How to disable Adobe Creative Cloud during startup on the Mac

PUBLISHED: November 14, 2020

Deprecation Notice: This article was written more than a year ago which means that its information might no longer be up-to-date. We cannot therefore guarantee the accuracy of it's contents.

How to disable Adobe Creative Cloud during startup on the Mac

Whenever any Adobe Creative Cloud application, such as Photoshop, is installed on macOS a number of background processes are created for a seamless experience across their suite of applications. However, if none of these features are required, then you are stuck with some unnecessary “bloatware”. We will in this quick guide show how you can disable Creative Cloud during startup on your Mac.

Adobe Creative Cloud Bloatware

Before we start let us have a quick look at the processes that our friends at Adobe install behind our back.

Disable Creative Cloud - Image 1

As you can see we have at least 14 running processes consuming a total of 367 MB of unnecessary RAM. Let us go ahead and make the necessary changes to disable them during system startup.

Disable Creative Cloud

In a Terminal, type the following two commands:

launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist
launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.ccxprocess.plist

This will prevent any Creative Cloud process from launching during system startup*.

*Please note that certain services are required to run the actual Adobe application, so when you for example start Photoshop, a few processes will re-appear in the Activity Monitor.

Disable Creative Cloud - Image 2

Restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Disable Creative Cloud - Image 3

Enable Creative Cloud

If you decide to use Creative Cloud again, the services can simply be re-enabled by typing the following commands:

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist
launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.ccxprocess.plist

The services will start immediately without having to reboot.

Disable Creative Cloud - Image 4

Summary

This guide has shown how you can prevent Adobe Creative Cloud from launching during system startup.

Further information

For further information, type launchctl without any additional arguments.

$ launchctl

Usage: launchctl <subcommand> ... | help [subcommand]

Subcommands:
	bootstrap       Bootstraps a domain or a service into a domain.
	bootout         Tears down a domain or removes a service from a domain.
	enable          Enables an existing service.
	disable         Disables an existing service.
	kickstart       Forces an existing service to start.
	attach          Attach the system's debugger to a service.
	debug           Configures the next invocation of a service for debugging.
	kill            Sends a signal to the service instance.
	blame           Prints the reason a service is running.
	print           Prints a description of a domain or service.
	print-cache     Prints information about the service cache.
	print-disabled  Prints which services are disabled.
	plist           Prints a property list embedded in a binary (targets the Info.plist by default).
	procinfo        Prints port information about a process.
	hostinfo        Prints port information about the host.
	resolveport     Resolves a port name from a process to an endpoint in launchd.
	limit           Reads or modifies launchd's resource limits.
	runstats        Prints performance statistics for a service.
	examine         Runs the specified analysis tool against launchd in a non-reentrant manner.
	config          Modifies persistent configuration parameters for launchd domains.
	dumpstate       Dumps launchd state to stdout.
	dumpjpcategory  Dumps the jetsam properties category for all services.
	reboot          Initiates a system reboot of the specified type.
	bootshell       Brings the system up from single-user mode with a console shell.
	load            Bootstraps a service or directory of services.
	unload          Unloads a service or directory of services.
	remove          Unloads the specified service name.
	list            Lists information about services.
	start           Starts the specified service.
	stop            Stops the specified service if it is running.
	setenv          Sets the specified environment variables for all services within the domain.
	unsetenv        Unsets the specified environment variables for all services within the domain.
	getenv          Gets the value of an environment variable from within launchd.
	bsexec          Execute a program in another process' bootstrap context.
	asuser          Execute a program in the bootstrap context of a given user.
	submit          Submit a basic job from the command line.
	managerpid      Prints the PID of the launchd controlling the session.
	manageruid      Prints the UID of the current launchd session.
	managername     Prints the name of the current launchd session.
	error           Prints a description of an error.
	variant         Prints the launchd variant.
	version         Prints the launchd version.
	help            Prints the usage for a given subcommand.