Running Photoshop is taking up massive disc space

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
November 8, 2025
3 replies
181 views

I need help trouble shooting a computer disc space/Photoshop issue. My Windows laptop has 235 GB disc space and 32GB RAM, currently has 130GB disc space available. All I have open is the CC desktop app and my 11GB .psb Photoshop file. As I work in the file, doing basic layer mask and curves adjustments (nothing crazy), the computer's disc space progressively fills up until it's maxed out (thankfully I can save to my external hard drive). If I close my file, Photoshop, and the CC desktop, the available disc space returns to 130GB. What gives??

The computer is a Dell Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10610U CPU @ 1.80GHz (2.30 GHz)

I am operating Photoshop 27.0.

Windows

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njs22214Author

Participant

This is so very helpful. Thank you so much!!

D Fosse

Community Expert

All I have open is the CC desktop app and my 11GB .psb Photoshop file.

By @njs22214

That's a huge file by any measure! 130 GB will go in a blink. You should have 500 GB to 1 TB free disk space for these file sizes.

If you cannot clear out more space for the scratch disk, go into Preferences and reduce history states to 1. That means you can't undo, but it will dramatically reduce the size of the scratch file.

And it's not just the scratch disk. Smart objects and many of the newer AI-based functions in PS/ACR use the system pagefile for temporary data storage. There is no free lunch.

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njs22214Author

Participant

Thank you for the feedback! I do have multiple smart object layers. I'll rasterize them and see if that helps too.

N

njs22214Author

Participant

I've been digging into other threads, it seems I'm not the only encountering this issue. I just assigned the scratch disk to my external harddrive, which has well over 100GB available (another thread commenter recommended allowing no less than 100GB for scratch disc space). Hopefully this helps.

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