MOTUnation.com

I knew in advance that this would be the biggest problem with getting a new computer.

I have searched my entire email archive for the word "illustrator", and though my order and followup for CS6 in DEC 2012 show up, none of the correspondence included license numbers, and my previous licenses are rejected.

If I log in at their website, there is zero information about my products and codes; just personal info for contact/etc.

I am at a loss for where to look. Might this info be in a preferences file somewhere?

Remember, my old macPro won't boot anymore, but I did clone it via Time machine and Migration Assistant (since I don't yet have an external enclosure for my PCIe SSD system drive).

My recollection is that a friend of mine recently had to get a new computer and found he was screwed so abandoned Adobe products forever. I think the license can't be transferred to a new computer because they want to force everyone into the "one shoe fits all" subscription model that assumes we all use their products daily, and for income (I rarely use them, and not for income).

It looks to me like you get a dock so that you can Boot from your old drive, deactivate the license and re activate on your new Mac.

https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/pol ... ducts.html

I assume you've tried here https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/glo ... umber.html

They say "If you lost your serial number, or your product is not listed in your account, contact us."

Thanks, Mike -- I think that's what I did the last time around, going from my always-useless-the-entire-time-I-owned-it early "Pixar Lamp" iMac to the 2010 MacPro. It had simply been so long that I had forgotten.

I'm disinclined to contact Adobe except as a last resort, in case it triggers a manual intervention to lock me out vs. an automatic acceptance of my moving of a license the way Mike described. I would check with my friend first, as he had a very distasteful experience when he tried to move a license via direct Adobe contact due to having had trouble the other ways.

In order to boot from my old drive, I'll have to buy that OWC Mercury enclosure for SSD's. I don't believe a backup drive will be honoured as a license tgarget, and due to last weekend's fiasco, am not sure that I have a bootable backup drive that includes my licenses vs. just the raw OS stuff.

So I did find my serial numbers for CS4 and before, as well as current Lightroom, but for some reason -- even though I purchased and redeemed them at Adobe's website -- nothing for CS6.

It looks like you redeem a code and that there's no S/N for CS6, so I've got to find those emails and hope I have a track record, which I may not if it was done through US Mail instead.

Both Illustrator and Photoshop start up in trial mode now, with no opportunity to even enter an S/N, so I have a feeling (after scouring their Help and the entire GUI) that it isn't even an option.

Maybe if I find all the Preferences files and trash them. But I doubt my CS4 S/N's are good for CS6.

WTH? My serial numbers are 20 digits each, and the license manager that pops up from Photoshop requires 24 digits and so won't let me go to the next page!

I did system reports, which had my serial numbers in them. But as my new computer may be stuck in "Tryout version" until that expires, I'm going to uninstall and reinstall to see if the Help Menu's actual Activate menu item then shows up and if it accepts my 20-digits S/N.

In case I have to close apps while doing the install, here's a helpful page on how to install CS6 perpetual licenses on macOS Sierra, which apparently doesn't work the standard way:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/ ... ierra.html

I'll probably have to update this incrementally, as Adobe requires all apps, including browsers, to be closed during installs -- a PITA since often we need to reference stuff on the web to help figure out what we're doing.

I've gotten as far as I can get with this, but hit several brick walls.

Photoshop let me use my CS6 S/N of 20 digits length, and auto-filled the last box with four "X"'s automatically, then appeared to authorize, but when I launch it is in Tryout mode again! yet I had trashed all preferences when doing the uninstall, before reinstalling.

Illustrator, however, only has a 16-digit S/N for CS6, and neither auto-filled at either end nor let me type an "X" nor accepted 0's at either end nor liked it if I prefaced with the first four or eight digits of my Photoshop S/N (in case those are generic across CS6).

So now I have Photoshop in Trial Mode, and no Illustrator at all (unless I let it install in Trial Mode).

I thought the perpetual licenses were going to be honoured forever, but that Adobe simply didn't promise updates to CS6 or future compatibility with OS upgrades?

Unless this whole shebang is part and parcel of the "not compatible with macOS Sierra" thing.

I cannot afford a subscription model for products I use twice a year at most. I use Lightroom more frequently than that and NEVER have problems with it, but then, it isn't part of Creative Suite?

mhschmieder wrote:So now I have Photoshop in Trial Mode, and no Illustrator at all (unless I let it install in Trial Mode).

I left Adobe a while back, I'm done with their nonsense. For Photoshop, here are two excellent alternatives:

• Affinity Photo
  Photoline

For Illustrator:

• Affinity Designer

If you use Premier a great alternative:

• HitFilm Pro 2017

Thanks, Bill -- I didn't know about those two specific products/companies.

It may be enough to have CS6 on my Windows work computer, as I mostly just use those products for my day job anyway, and even then it is mostly to verify that my application exports proper EPS and SVG data.

I had hoped at some point to get into computer-based art, scanning in old works, etc., but it may be best that I look past Adobe for that stuff at this point.

At least Lightroom is a great product (though it's been awhile since they've updated it) and doesn't participate in their licensing nonsense. They probably know most of its clients are not corporations with discretionary budgets for "overhead" costs like Creative Suite subscriptions.

Found them! Somehow they got processed through the Adobe Licensing Website (LWS), from which I was able to retrieve the serial numbers (after some effort).

I found the Adobe emails from early January 2013 by manually scrolling. Why does Apple Mail no longer find emails, even if all letters are the correct case?

It's still strange that the serial numbers reported by the apps themselves are incorrect and aren't even truncated versions of the correct ones.

Strangely, their main website rejects these numbers too, with or without dashes, saying it must be a valid 24-character S/N, which this time it is.

At least the Photoshop S/N "took" in the app itself. Don't know about Illustrator yet as I have to re-run the installer, which crashed previously.

UPDATE: Illustrator installed properly and authorized correctly this time.

I think the failure of the main site to accept my serial numbers may mean they are corporate vs. personal licenses for CS6, unlike my older licenses which were Mac-only.

At the LWS website, there are two separate S/N's: one for Mac, and one for Windows. I may have hedged my bets due to the panic of no more perpetual licenses for sale after December 2012.

Illustrator is at r16.0.4, and Photoshop is at r13.0.6, after running the Adobe Application Manager to catch all available updates.