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Participant
June 15, 2022
Question

Photoshop appears to be causing mac other storage to fill up every time I use it - PLEASE HELP

  • June 15, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 841 views

Hi, 

 

I'd really appreciate some help with this, as at the moment it seems like using photoshop is causing my macs other storage to balloon and go from about 230 gb of free space to next to nothing in about 20 mins!

 

Not sure if there might be some update or setting that can help or if anyone else has had this issue. 

 

Might be that using other Adobe programs also affects it as well. I use Illustrator and Indesign but Photoshop seems to affect it the worse. 

 

Apples help was to suggest the usual deleting of cahes and unwanted files and resets, but regular factory resets are a pain and time consuming and drastic. 

 

I'd really like to know if there's anyting that might be causing this. 

 

Any help would be massively appreciated. 

 

Thanks.  

2 replies

Participant
April 4, 2025

I am facing the same issue, it gets fixed every time i restart my device and then shows up again after working for a bit. It's quite irritating now

 

davescm
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 4, 2025

@aasthaetic It sounds like you have insufficient free space on the drive you have chosen to use as scratch disk. Raster image editing requires a large amount of data to be stored while working. That is why we normally recommend a fast drive with at least 500GB free.
How much space is there on your scratch drive?
Dave

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 16, 2022

Please post a screenshot of Photoshop Preferences > Scratch Disks.

 

If you're working with very big files and/or many files open at the same time, 230 GB can be gone very quickly. I always recommend at least 500GB free space.

Participant
June 16, 2022
Hi d fosse,

thanks for getting back to me. Here's a screengrab of my scratch disks and
storage breakdown on the mac. It will get completely filled if I keep
working in photoshop for longer. At the moment i've just opened it and
opened a couple of files which are about 1gb each.

I think you might be right, it's destroying the space. They're not huge
files though which is a bit weird. Biggest I'm working with is 4gb
sometimes which is large but it'll be the only thing open.

I have been using some huge InDesign files as well though. One was 10GB.

If I assign my scratch disk to an empty external ssd, do you think that
would stop my mac's other storage filling up then?

I do have an external ssd plugged in but for some reason it's not showing
up at the moment. I will probably buy a new dedicated one for work though.

I had been working on the desktop just because photoshop kept disallowing
me to save files onto the external for some reason. Hopefully if the
scratch disks are assigned to the same drive that the work is saved on that
will help.

Thanks
Duncan

--
*Duncan Letcher Design*
D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 14, 2024

@duncan16B8 @D Fosse  Did this ever get resolved? I am experiencing it on a massive level and desperately need to figure it out. Any help you can give would be much appreciated. Thanks!


Show us a screenshot of Photoshop Preferences > Scratch disks.