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How to Properly Uninstall Adobe Illustrator From Your Mac

Adobe Illustrator scatters fonts, plugins, and presets across your Mac. Here's how to remove every leftover file from /Library and ~/Library cleanly.

8 min read

Illustrator’s app bundle is around 3GB. That sounds reasonable until you discover the 4GB of synced libraries in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe, the 2GB of font cache, and the half-dozen Adobe daemons that keep running after you “uninstall” it. Drag-to-trash leaves all of that behind.

This guide covers a complete Illustrator removal — including the Adobe components Illustrator shares with other Creative Cloud apps. If you have multiple Adobe apps installed, read the warnings carefully. You don’t want to break Photoshop while removing Illustrator.

Where Illustrator hides its files

Illustrator’s footprint on macOS Sonoma and later breaks into four buckets:

  • The app bundle at /Applications/Adobe Illustrator 2024/
  • Per-user data in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator 28/ (the version number changes — 27 for 2023, 28 for 2024)
  • Caches in ~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.illustrator/ and ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/
  • Shared Adobe components in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/ and /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/

The shared components are the tricky part. Illustrator depends on Adobe Fonts, the Color Sync engine, the Crash Reporter, and Creative Cloud’s update agent. Other Adobe apps depend on these too.

Step 1: Quit Illustrator and Adobe background processes

Open Activity Monitor and search for “Adobe.” You’ll likely see:

  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Desktop Service
  • Core Sync
  • AdobeIPCBroker
  • Adobe Crash Reporter
  • AGSService
  • CCXProcess

Quit each one. If “Adobe Crash Reporter” keeps respawning, ignore it — it’ll go away when its parent quits.

Step 2: Use the Creative Cloud uninstaller

Creative Cloud Desktop has a per-app uninstaller that handles license deregistration cleanly. Skip this step at your peril — Adobe’s licensing servers will think Illustrator is still installed and may complain when you reinstall.

  1. Open Creative Cloud Desktop from your Applications folder
  2. Sign in if you’re not already
  3. Click All apps in the sidebar
  4. Find Illustrator and click the three dots to the right of the Open button
  5. Pick Uninstall
  6. When it asks “Remove preferences?” — choose Yes unless you want to preserve your custom workspace

The uninstaller takes about a minute. It removes the main app bundle and most components, but leaves caches and a surprising amount of support data behind.

Let Sweep uninstall properlyDrag-to-trash leaves traces. Sweep wipes the app + support files + prefs + caches + helpers at once. Get Sweep free →

Step 3: Remove the leftover support files

Open Finder and press Cmd+Shift+G. Visit each path and delete Illustrator-related contents:

User-level (no password needed)

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator 28/ (or your version)
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator 28 Settings/
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/SwatchExchange/ — if you only used Illustrator
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Settings/ — color profiles
  • ~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.illustrator/
  • ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/Illustrator/
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.illustrator.plist
  • ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator 28 Settings/ — workspace and preferences
  • ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.adobe.illustrator.savedState/
  • ~/Library/Logs/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator/

System-level (admin password required)

  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator 28/ — system-wide Illustrator components
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PDF/ — only delete if no other Adobe apps installed
  • /Library/Caches/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2/
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/PDF Settings 28/
Tip: Before deleting anything in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/, check if you have other Adobe apps installed. Folders like "Linguistics", "PDF", "PDF Settings", and "Color" are shared across the entire Creative Cloud suite. Delete those only if you're removing all Adobe software.

Step 4: Delete fonts Illustrator activated

Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit) activates fonts via Creative Cloud. If Illustrator was your main app for typography work, you may have hundreds of activated fonts cached locally. They live in:

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/r/ — actively synced fonts
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/c/ — cached fonts

If you’re keeping Creative Cloud Desktop, leave these alone — they’ll re-sync if you ever activate fonts again. If you’re nuking Adobe entirely, delete both r and c directories.

Step 5: Clean up Illustrator-specific plugins

If you installed third-party plugins (like Astute Graphics, VectorScribe, or Phantasm), they live alongside Illustrator’s app bundle:

  • /Applications/Adobe Illustrator 28/Plug-ins/ — third-party plugins included here are removed when you delete the app folder
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator 28/en_US/Plug-ins/ — user-installed plugins

The user folder is independent. If you reinstall Illustrator later, third-party plugins from this folder activate automatically.

Step 6: Handle the launch agents and helper tool

Illustrator itself doesn’t install background agents, but the Adobe shared components do. If you’re removing Illustrator and have no other Adobe apps:

  • /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist
  • /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.GC.Invoker-1.0.plist
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2.plist
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.agsservice.plist
  • /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2

In Terminal, unload the agents before deletion:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2.plist
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist

Then delete the plist files in Finder.

Step 7: Empty Trash and reboot

Some Adobe daemons hold open file handles. A reboot ensures every reference is released and the system rebuilds its launchd cache. Skip this step and you’ll see leftover Adobe processes in Activity Monitor on next login.

Don’t dig through ~/Library yourselfSweep hunts every leftover an uninstaller misses. Free download for Mac →

How much space does this reclaim?

A typical Illustrator-only uninstall reclaims:

  • 3GB from the app bundle
  • 1-2GB from caches
  • 500MB-2GB from support files and preferences
  • 0-4GB from Adobe Fonts cache (if you used Typekit heavily)

Total: 4-11GB on most machines. If you’re also removing Photoshop, InDesign, and the rest of Creative Cloud, you can clear 50GB+ from a heavily-used Mac.

Why an uninstaller can save the headache

The manual route is fine if you have time and want to verify each deletion. The problem is that Adobe uses inconsistent bundle IDs — com.adobe.illustrator, com.adobe.Illustrator, com.adobe.Adobe-Illustrator-28. Miss a casing variant or a version number and files get left behind.

Sweep’s app uninstaller scans by both bundle ID and developer signature, so it catches every variant. It also flags shared Adobe components and warns you when other Adobe apps still depend on them — so you don’t accidentally break Photoshop while cleaning up Illustrator.

For one-off cleanups, manual works. For routine maintenance or a full Adobe purge, an automated uninstaller saves real time.

What if I just want to reset Illustrator?

If your goal is to fix a broken Illustrator (preferences corrupted, plugins crashing) rather than remove it permanently:

  1. Quit Illustrator completely
  2. Delete only ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator 28 Settings/
  3. Relaunch — Illustrator rebuilds preferences with defaults

This is much faster than a full uninstall + reinstall and fixes 90% of “Illustrator won’t open” problems.

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