Camera Raw causing Photoshop to freeze

It's June 2024 and this issue is STILL happening. I keep losing work. Adobe please sort it out.

There is no solution to this. Anyone claiming that there is, is incorrect. The only solution is to force quit Photoshop and hope nothing gets lost and recovers. When the Camera Raw Loading Bar shows up when you launch the filter and does not progress you simply cannot access any other menus. No preferences, no settings nada.

Force quite is you only option. You can reset/throw out prefs etc, but this does nothing. The problem eventually happens again. 

I have noticed that the issue mostly happens if I am in the middle of saving a large document and then entering the Camera Raw filter. So, my only suggestion/solution is to wait for the files to save before entering Camera Raw. But once you get stuck on that loading bar in the filter you have no choice but to force quit Photoshop.

This is overall likely a memory or Graphics processing issue. Things like cleaning up your local files and making sure that your Photoshop memory does not exceed 70% of available memory usage is also important. And make sure that you don't have too many large files opened in Photoshop all at the same time. The reason Photoshop and Adobe are unable to fix the issue is because individual hardware and software and memory issues are not something they have control over. The bottom line is that photoshop is one of the biggest memory usage on your system. So anything to free up memory hopefully be helpful, but once you are stuck in this situation in camera raw there is simply no other solution other than to force quit the program.

Go to Edit > Prefercences > Camera Raw > Performance and then press Purge Cache. That did the trick for me. The full cache folder can be the reason for the freeze.