Saturated working disk : may I transfer Photoshop to an external hard disk

Question

Hi there kind experts,

I work on a MacBook Pro with a small hard disk (125 Go) and I now get this well known message "saturated working disk". I use Photoshop 2022 (version 23.5.3) to work on photos that I stock on an external drive.

My question is : may I transfer Photoshop on the external drive and work from it?

Many thanks for your answers.

Best.

Alain

D Fosse · Answer

Moving the application is pointless and achieves nothing. As Ged implies, 3.5 GB is an insignificant drop in the ocean here.

What you need to make room for is the scratch disk. This is separate from the application. The scratch disk is where Photoshop puts its temporary working data.

Raster image editing moves huge amounts of data, much more than any RAM you may have installed. All that data has to go somewhere, and so it's written to disk. This is the scratch disk. Think of RAM as a cache to the scratch disk's main memory. The scratch file contains all history states for all open documents, plus overhead for smart objects and so on.

For casual work you can get away with 30-50 GB free space for the scratch disk, but for any serious work you will need between 200-500 GB or even more.

The scratch file is deleted when you exit Photoshop, but there has to be room for it when you work. If there's not enough, Photoshop can't operate and may refuse to open altogether.

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