Last March, I pre-ordered Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Universal Binary for my Intel iMac. My initial impressions of the software were not good, but I adapted and worked around things and have been somewhat satisfied I didn’t waste my money on completely crappy software. Until this morning, of course.

Since Kenno gave me paid time on Livejournal and a whole bunch of user icon space, I thought I’d make myself a bunch of silly animated gifs. I hadn’t tried that yet with PE6, though I had read in the help files that it was possible.

Seemed easy enough: put each frame of the animation in a new layer, and then save as a gif file and make the appropriate decisions about frame rate and whether or not it should loop. All extremely straightforward, and the settings were all easy to find. Alas, the settings are not easy to use, because I couldn’t change the frame rate or stop the animation from looping.

I go to the internet to see if it’s something I am missing, something the instructions left out, or if there is a problem with the software, either on my computer or in general. I find this at Adobe:

When you choose File > Save for Web to export a GIF file from Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 or Photoshop Elements 4.0 on Mac OS, you can not change the Loop or Frame Delay settings in the Animation options.

The Frame Delay value can not be changed in Photoshop Elements 6.0. The instructions above will work to change the value, but when you save the Animated GIF file the frame delay in the file will always be the default of 0.2 seconds.

The Loop option can not be disabled. This is a known problem with the Save for Web dialog in Photoshop Elements.

Yet again, Adobe proves themselves to put out crappy software for the Mac and never bother to fix it. How quickly Adobe forgets where their “fantastic” software got it’s start. Yes, right on Macs! Now they could care less whether or not the software they bother to put out for Macs works or not.

I can tell you that this ridiculousness on top of the fact presets won’t work unless the program is running under an admin account on my computer means only one thing. When the time comes to upgrade to newer and better software somewhere down the road, I will be clinging to my rule about never buying anything from Adobe. I have better things to waste my money on than broken software. I wish I hadn’t disregarded my rule this time.

Truly, it’s pathetic.