Participant

Question

Scratch disks full in photoshop and can't save any image - Mac OS

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 13, 2021
3 replies
1075 views

Hi,

I just only bought the monthly photoshop and having this prob which is really irritating me.
The downloadble version of photoshops was so good and easy.

Everytme i want to save a file , photoshop is telling me -

Scratch disks full.

I need help. I had to hold OPTION and COMMAND and open photoshop everytime for this error to go off.

I cannot be doing this forever.

Is there any help here?

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

Bob_Hallam

Legend

To solve this probem you will need more scratch disk space. Purchase a cheap 250gb external drive (or larger) and after connecting it select that drive as the scratch disk PS uses in the PS pref's. Your problem will be over 🙂

ICC programmer and developer, Photographer, artist and color management expert, Print standards and process expert.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

US$100 buys you around 5-6TB of USB external drive space. Make sure you have a dock or the drive is USB-C.

Mohit Goyal

Community Manager

Hi there,

We're sorry for the scratch disk issue. Which Photoshop version do you have installed? You should have at least 20BG free space on the internal drive or a set scratch disk. For more troubleshooting steps, check out the following troubleshooting article: https://adobe.ly/3tIfn26

Let us know the outcome.

Thanks,

Mohit

davescm

Community Expert

20GB free space is nowhere near enough scratch space for practical work. Photoshop will open, but will soon choke and throw up that error.

Dave

jane-e

Community Expert

The Adobe Help page recommends only 20GB minimum, which happens to be the exact same amount @Chandran5FBA has that is giving her the scratch disk error message. Sigh.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-scratch-disk-is-full.html

D Fosse

Community Expert

That message usually means exactly what it says. 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. This is the scratch disk.

In other words - this isn't a Photoshop setting or preference, this is real, physical disk space needed for normal operation. How much free space do you have?

Most people underestimate the space needed for the scratch disk. 100GB should be considered bare minimum, but personally I would never be comfortable with anything less than 500GB (I have much more).

C

Chandran5FBAAuthor

Participant

Hi,

I jusT bought a new MAC. iMac (24-inch, M1, 2021)11.5.2 Mac OS Big Sur.

I have 20 GB free storage available out of 245GB.

D Fosse

Community Expert

That's clearly not enough. A disk with only 20 GB left is for all practical purposes full, and you need to do something to clear out space.

Quite aside from Photoshop, a disk that full will soon give you other and more serious problems. I can fill up 20 GB in minutes! I have single files approaching that size.

If you're going to do serious work in Photoshop, a single 250 GB drive is going to give you problems. At the very least, you can't have anything other than the operating system and applications on that drive. Everything else should go to other drives. You should never allow a drive to fill up more than 60-70% or so, especially not an active system drive.

Start by getting another disk and move as much as you can over. Then look at cleaning up your user account, which is where most of the junk tends to accumulate. For Windows there is a brilliant little utility called WinDirStat which shows you exactly what's filling up your drives and where it is, can't recall what the Mac equivalent is called.

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