Submitting Crash Reports
What is Adobe Crash Reporter?
In the unfortunate event that Photoshop should crash, the Adobe Crash Reporter can collect a log of what Photoshop was doing at the time the crash occurred and upload that information into a database here where the Photoshop engineering team can analyze it.
Adobe Crash Reporter has been an invaluable tool for helping the Photoshop development team track down and fix the majority of crashing bugs in Photoshop CS5 with the 12.0.1, 12.0.2, 12.0.3 and 12.0.4 updates.
See Keeping Photoshop Up-To-Date to make sure you’re running the latest version.
In addition, the use of Crash Reporter during the prerelease beta testing period prior to shipping Photoshop CS5 was extremely successful in helping us identify issues from the major rewrite on the Macintosh platform (Carbon to Cocoa conversion).
Why Submit Reports?
Why submit crash reports to Adobe with your email address and description of what you were doing when the problem occurred?
- With known issues, we can email you a solution for correcting the problem.
- For unknown issues, the more reports we have with detailed descriptions and contact info, the more likely we will be able to track down the problem and provide a solution.
- Thanks to the help of users who have submitted reports with email contact information and detailed descriptions, Photoshop CS5 is one of the most stable application in the Creative Suite – Despite a major rewrite and having the largest installed user base for Creative Suite applications.
How to Submit Reports
On Macintosh, the Adobe Crash Reporter dialog will appear a few moments after the problem occurs:
- Please provide a detailed description. If you can consistently reproduce the problem with specific steps, submit those steps. Even if you don’t know the exact steps to consistently reproduce the problem, try to provide as much detail as you can about what you were doing when the problem occurred: What operation were you performing when the problem occurred? What type of document were you using? Did you recently use and plug-ins? If the problem is specific to a particular file, feel free to post the file via Dropbox, YouSendIt, or some other free file sharing service and include a link to the file in the problem description.
- Please include your email address. Someone from the product may want contact you to gather more information from you or we may notify you of a fix or a workaround via email.
Please Note: The Adobe Crash Reporter should not be confused with either the Apple or Microsoft crash reporters, which do not send any information to us.
Adobe Crash Reporter Privacy
You have the assurance of myself, and the rest of the Photoshop team, that Adobe is not monitoring your activity through Adobe Crash Reporter. Photoshop detects the crash and we don’t know anything about it until you send the report to Adobe. The report originates on your computer. If you choose to submit a report (and we very much appreciate if you would) only non-personally-identifiable information is sent to Adobe. This includes information such as which part of the software encountered an issue.
Adding more information, such as what you were doing when the error occurred, is very helpful in diagnosing the problem. If you choose to provide your contact info such as your email address, it will only be used in case we want to contact you about your crash or notify you of a fix or a workaround. It will not be used for marketing purposes. You can send the report anonymously if you’d like.
These reports go directly to the Photoshop engineering team and it’s a tremendous resource for you to help us improve the product.
Thanks in advance for helping make Photoshop the best product it can be.
