Chosen Solution
A friend gave me a mid 2011 iMac with an i5 processor. If I upgrade to an SSD drive and max out the RAM, can I load a current macOS and run Lightroom or photoshop? Not doing anything major just touching up family photos and stuff. Thanks
Officially your machine will upgrade to High Sierra which will run Lightroom and Photoshop just fine.
I have the same iMac - unfortunately it will only run up to 10.13 High Sierra (which still gets security patches) but Photoshop CS6 and even video editing works perfectly for me. Haven’t tried PS2020 but it should also run fine. You could get a patcher to install 10.15 Catalina but I really don’t recommend you do it.
