How to Change Where Adobe Installs without Reinstalling

About Adobe apps

Adobe is a global computer software firm based in the United States that has traditionally specialized in tools for the development and distribution of a broad variety of material, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures, and print. All these programs are so popular such as Photoshop, Acrobat DC, Lightroom, Flash, Animate, etc.

Many people who work in the art and entertainment field need Adobe apps in their daily work, and usually, they need more than one Adobe program for creative works. What’s more, they have to store many multimedia materials which would take up much available space on the disk. It won’t take a long time to drain all the free space on the disk. So, many users wish to move Adobe programs to another location.

How to change where Adobe installs in Windows

Well, changing the location of some programs is not like copying and pasting a file from one drive to another, there are lots of potential points you need to pay attention to, such as storage path, directory information, and hidden data files… Your Adobe programs cannot run without any one of them. Then, how to move Photoshop and other Adobe apps to another drive? We’ll show it in this part.

1. Use Adobe settings to change the creative cloud install location

To help users manage all programs conveniently, Adobe now has the Adobe Creative Cloud app which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Express, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat Pro programs.

The Creative Cloud applications are installed in the system's default directory. You may alter the location where your applications are installed using the Creative Cloud desktop software. All applications you install after this adjustment will be installed in the new location.

Step 1. Select the Creative Cloud icon in your Windows taskbar or the macOS menu bar to open the Creative Cloud desktop app.

Step 2. Select the Account icon in the upper right, and then select “Preferences”.

Step 3. Select Apps in the sidebar and select the edit icon next to Install location, choose the location where you want to install your Creative Cloud apps.

Step 4. Select “Done” to apply the changes.

After the change, your apps will install in the new location.

2. Use professional App Mover to move installed Adobe apps

To set the default storage location, you can save apps to the new locations. However, what about those installed programs? Since you can’t move them by copying and pasting manually, which will damage location information to failure the boot, we recommend you try AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a Windows disk and partition manager with “App Mover” utility.

The feature “App Mover” of this software can move installed programs from the current location to another drive or disk and it will modify the directory information automatically to make sure the moved apps can boot and run as before. And the operation only requires you to use our mouse.

Step 1. Install and launch Partition assistant. Click “Free up” on in the top toolbar, and choose “App Mover”.

Step 2. In the new window, select “App Mover”.

Step 3. Then you will see all partitions, and the number and size of installed programs on every partition will also be displayed. Select one partition that you want to move applications from and click "Next".

Step 4. Choose Adobe applications you want to move and select the target location, then click "Move".

Step 5. In the pop-up window, you need to confirm forcibly closing running applications when moving starts. Click "OK" to begin the process.

Wait for a while, the selected Adobe apps will be moved to another location, and you can run one of them to have a check.

Bonus tips: Other knacks to extend drive space

If your disk has more than one drive, you can use the “Allocate Free Space” feature to straightly share some available space from a drive with sufficient space to the drive with a space crisis. In only 3 steps you can extend a drive.

Step 1. Right-click partition D in the software and select “Allocate Free Space”.

Step 2. Set how much space you want to allocate from a partition that has enough free space and choose the target partition.

Step 3. Preview the result after allocation. If that’s what you want, just click "Apply" on the upper left to carry out the operation.

Note: You can also clean your PC to release more available space on your disk.

To sum up

If you don’t know how to change where Adobe installs, you can set the download settings in the Creative Cloud. But if you want to move installed Adobe installs, you can turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant to have a nice try.

In addition, if your current SSD or HDD is not enough for supporting you and you wish to change a new disk, this tool also has “Disk Clone Wizard” to help you easily do a disk upgrade without reinstalling anything. Or if you only wish to keep the OS, we also have the “Migrate OS to SSD” feature.

And if you’re a Windows Server user, you can choose our Server Edition, which supports Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2).