Creative Cloud Installation Madness

Last week I started having issues with one of my InDesign plugins. And overall lately, InDesign seemed buggy. It even stopped showing up in the Launchpad and it no longer had the correct application icon.

 I did all the usual things to attempt to fix it:

1. I uninstalled and reinstalled the plugins.
2. I trashed my InDesign references.
3. I restarted my computer.
4. I uninstalled all my plugins.
5. I updated inDesign.
6. I restarted my computer in Internet Recovery Mode.
7. I restarted my computer in regular Recovery mode.

Then I repeated most of the item a few times for good measure. But nothing helped. It only got worse! Somewhere along the line, ALL of my plugins stopped working. It's as if they weren't even installed... but they were.

The plugins are in the correct folder!

We finally found the culprit!

I reached out to a couple of developer friends of mine and Kris Coppieters was able to come to the rescue. Using a bit of Terminal wizard, he determined that my InDesign version 2017.1 was actually running from my Documents folder! Not the applications folder!

So we uninstalled InDesign, deleted the extra copy, and got ready to reinstall. But we needed to make sure it was installed in the correct spot. Did you know that hidden behind the small three dots in the top corner of the CC app are extra options?

When you choose Preferences, you can actually change the install location for the applications. Mine was set to Documents. That's what was causing all the problems!

Wrong Installation location

By changing it back to the Applications folder, and then reinstalling InDesign, my issue was fixed!

Correct Installation location!

What's so strange about this is that I did not change the install location. It changed by itself somehow!

Special thanks to Kris Coppieters and Caleb Clauset for spending some of their valuable time with me trying to figure out this issue.