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TECHNICAL GUIDE

Permission denied when attempting to save files (Photoshop)

Hal Hope
  • Updated

Recent macOS versions have altered the behavior of the Quick Look process, which has had an inadvertent effect specifically on the handling of Photoshop files stored on network shares.

In this case, Apple's Quick Look function holds onto a file and prevents changes to it, when Finder's default icon preview option is allowed (this shows the PSD image next to the file, rather than the generic PS icon). The process will eventually time out on its own after Finder is closed, but this isn't very useful in normal operations.

We've devised a couple of workarounds to account for the macOS behavior:
One is to disable Finder's icon preview altogether*, but this requires manually changing every Finder view type, and affects preview functionality for all file types.
Instead, we created a utility that does this more quickly and cleanly -- it will move the .qlgenerator to the appropriate place, delete the quicklook cache, reset quicklook, and relaunch Finder.
This means the Finder view does not need to be manually changed for each view type and for all files; the Quick Look behavior will only be modified specifically for Photoshop files.
For each Mac, download this OverrideQuickLook.tar file, double-click to extract it, and double-click again to run it. It can then be deleted.
(If you'd like to undo the override and restore the default behavior, use this RestoreQuickLook.command)
 

 
* If you prefer to change the behavior manually, rather than using the attached tool:

Right-click in Finder, go to "Show View Options", and uncheck the "Show icon preview" box.

This needs to be done separately for every Finder mode: column, list, gallery, etc.

This also needs to be done on every workstation that is going to be looking in that directory. If one user is browsing the directory with icon prevew turned on while another is trying to save, the save will fail.

This will not take effect immediately if the directory was initially opened with icons on. The quicklookd process must be killed (or the workstation needs to be rebooted).

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