Gatekeeper warnings prevent program from opening after being disabled

stephphot wrote:

Hi thanks for getting back to me I am trying to install Photoshop cs6 so I put the disk in and it starts to run then gatekeeper steps in and stops it states that its malware so I disable the gate keeper but I still get notification that its malware and won’t go any further, can you help please

Even if you could remove Gatekeeper entirely from your Macintosh – which you can't – that would not let you install and use Photoshop CS6 on any modern version of macOS.

Adobe discontinued Photoshop CS6 many years ago. It had 32-bit installation and DRM activation code, and Adobe never provided an updated 64-bit version of that code. So, once Catalina dropped support for 32-bit applications, it became impossible to do new, working, "clean" installs of Photoshop CS6 on Macs which ran Catalina or later.

A few people with existing, working installations on versions of macOS earlier than Catalina did continue using Photoshop CS6 after updating macOS "in place", but with no support from Adobe for any compatibility issues which sprang up. I don't know for how many versions of macOS after Catalina that worked before there were simply too many unaddressed compatibility issues for people to go on.

These days, there are additional problems:

• There's no way to install Photoshop CS6 on any Apple Silicon Mac. You can't do a "clean install" (the 32-bit installation and activation code isn't supported by Rosetta 2) or update a pre-Catalina installation "in place" (since no Apple Silicon Mac ever ran anything earlier than Catalina).
• Adobe may have shut down the CS6 DRM activation servers to make it impossible to reactivate CS6 even on older Intel-based Macs running pre-Catalina versions of macOS.

If Photoshop CS6 triggers anti-malware warnings, that is interesting – and it might even indicate a bug in the malware database ("false positive"), but it's not the cause of your real problem.

Bottom line: Put a fork in Photoshop CS6. It's done.

Either pay Adobe what they want to rent ("subscribe to") a modern version of Photoshop, or switch to some Photoshop alternative (such as Affinity Studio or GIMP).

Photoshop CS6 was discontinued almost 10 years ago. It is not compatible with any version of macOS after Mojave (10.14.x) which itself was EOL'd 7 years ago; and it is not compatible with any Apple Silicon Mac.

What Mac & version of macOS are you using?

Pls. be more specific.

What is the reason you disabled Gatekeeper? And how did you disable it?

What is the program you are attempting to open? From what source did you get the program?