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P: How to fix Photoshop Scratch Disks Full Error?

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
May 23, 2016
49 replies
597262 views

I am running Photoshop CC on my MacBook Air with macOS Sierra. Every time I attempt to open Photoshop through any means, the following message appears: "Could not initialize Photoshop because the scratch disks are full", and Photoshop does not open. I tried clearing space from my Mac in general including several GB worth of apps and removing several cache files, but nothing seems to work. I also tried holding down the command and option keys to reveal the Scratch Disk Preferences, and it lets me select the Startup and MacIntosh HD. Again, nothing worked. Anyone know how to fix this message, and/or clear scratch disk space?

{Moderator note: Edited the thread title PS-65057}

Correct answer Mohit Goyal

Hi all,

We're sorry for the scratch disk issue. Take a look at the following troubleshooting article which can help you to resolve the "Scratch disk is full" error: Troubleshoot scratch disk full errors in Photoshop

Please have a look and let us know if that helps.

Thanks,

Mohit

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patricktheart

Participant

Now on the 5th variant of the latest reforming of Photoshop. Happens year after year, sometimes beneficial, sometimes just annoying, but why oh why does every time it update I lose all my presets such as which disks to use as scratch disks? Buggers my daily routine - I know it is a minor task, but I can live without Photoshop creating minor tasks to interrupt my creative flow, thankyou.

Grrrrr.....

D Fosse

Community Expert

@patricktheart

If you lose your preferences in minor dot updates, something's wrong, like not having full administrator privileges in your user account.

With a major whole-number version update, preferences do not carry over, they never have. There is an option to migrate preferences, but I don't recommend it because of the high risk of accumulated errors carrying over as well.

As for actions, brushes, anything that can be saved out - save out and keep it in a safe place. Then it can always be easily reloaded.

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Pragyandeep_Senswa1839

Participant

tttt.jpg

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3xp0Sure16145617

Participant

this creative cloud driven revised photoshop is starting to look really comparable to the web browser equivelent and potential successor to photoshop imo. gimp is also completly free and runs withought exspansive program disk size needs. adobe needs to remember that this program runs in a partition or fixed storage size . exspanding storage shouldnt effect its startup. cs6 is the exact same program. so maybe i should end my subscription after paying thirdy dollars monthly for the past two years on a eleven year old macbook that still prefourms excelently and has more than enough of a spec list for photo editing in a laptop. an i7 16gb and intel onboard graphics are more than enough for future proofing the creative suite photoshop version - that was better. so im done!

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Eric38978183mabp

Participant

photoshop 7 is so old it fails with that message if your scratch disk is bigger than 1TB. Nothing you can do but find a smaller disk or upgrade.

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Benjyc247361610722529

Participant

This was ages ago but, I've just gone and got a Mac today. I have 450gb storage free and I then Installed photoshop and it came up with "scratch disk full" I then go onto my storage and my storage is full. Why? Why's photoshop using 450gb of storage???

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Lumigraphics

Legend

Photoshop likely isn't using 450Gb of scratch space. Go the the Apple menu, About This Mac. Depending on OS version it may have a storage tab or you may have a More Info button that takes you to the Settings app where you can see info about storage. Disk Utility also can give you info.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-storage-settings-mchl3d437fbc/mac

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/get-detailed-information-about-a-disk-dskutl1005/mac

You can also use an app like OmniDiskSweeper, DaisyDisk, or GrandPerspective to analyze disk usage.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more

https://www.insanelymac.com/blog/best-disk-space-analyzers-mac/

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Ranjana366734612p5l

Participant

The inches > pixels helped thank you so much 🙂

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kizito35622708wmag

Participant

i had the same problem when my local disk space left was 5.61GB. After creating more free space now totaling to 11GB, the program was able to open

D Fosse

Community Expert

11 GB is still nothing. 11 GB can be gone in seconds. And then you quickly have bigger problems than Photoshop.

You need to think on a whole different level. A bare minimum for Photoshop to work efficiently is 100 GB - but my advice is 250 GB and up. Then you're reasonably safe.

Advanced raster image editing requires huge amounts of memory, much more than any RAM you may have installed. So temporary working data are written to disk, aka scratch disk.

Every history state, for every open document, potentially adds the full starting file size. Smart objects and other advanced functions have additional overhead.

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acrobatica

Participant

So, as I also had this "Scratch disk Full" error with PhotoShop 7 on Windows10-64bit yesterday, and ALL the given solutions are NOT working, here is mine that works:
The problem isn´t in the presence of a "drive bigger than 1TB", it is due to "drive with more than 1 TB free of space" !
So just make an i.e. \TEMP2 folder on that concerning harddrive, and fill it up with some stuff until the free space is less than ca. 950 GB.
That´s it. Works like a charm for me.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

I also had this "Scratch disk Full" error with PhotoShop 7 on Windows10-64bit.
By @acrobatica

===============

<shaking head> What a sloppy solution! Just get newer software already. </shaking heading>

The whole point of having a computer with 1 or more TBs of free HD space is improved storage capacity & performance. Compared to current Photoshop (see below), PS7 is an ancient relic. It's unfit for use with modern equipment. Clinging to aged-out software with half-baked workarounds makes absolutely no sense. Not when you can do so much more with latest Photoshop + Lightroom for a paltry $10/month. 🤔 🤔 https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

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acrobatica

Participant

I just solved the problem in a minute, so what ?

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emilyp24827230

Participant

I am having this problem too. When I press option/command to try to move scratch disk to alternative hard drive this comes up and doesn't give me any option to change disk. Any ideas? I can't get into PS at all. I have cleared up a lot of my hard drive but still won't let me in. Help! Typically in the middle of some work. so need it to work!

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Lumigraphics

Legend

First of all, with only 3.5GB free on your startup drive, your computer could crash. Make sure you have given Photoshop permission to access external drives and definitely clear up space before things go very, very wrong.

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1Mollybird

Known Participant

For some reason Photoshop doesn't even see my two external LaCie drives. So nothing works to help this.

siobhanf11160300

Participant

Good Morning, I am starting a new photoshop project & but message comes up saying scratch discs are full?

kind regards

Siobhān Ferguson

D Fosse

Community Expert

Please show a screenshot of Edit > Preferences > Scratch disks:

Generally, raster image editing moves massive amounts of data around, much more than any RAM you may have installed. This temporary working data has to go somewhere, so it's written to disk. That's the scratch disk.

For casual work with small files, you can get away with 30 - 50 GB. For serious work, you should have 500 GB - 1 TB.

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