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Shebbe
Community Expert
ShebbeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 2, 2026
Question

Premiere's additional files' structure getting out of hand.

  • March 2, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 15 views

The amount of additional data Premiere projects can potentially have keeps increasing with new features. I think the development team should look into streamlining this data when it comes to how/where it is stored because currently they are all their own entities next to the project file.

 

To my knowledge this is the current list of ‘things’ that can spawn next to the project file.

  • Adobe Premiere Pro Audio Previews
  • Adobe Premiere Pro Auto-Save
  • Adobe Premiere Pro Captured and Generated
  • Adobe Premiere Pro Video Previews
  • [project filename] .prin file
  • [project filename] Masks folder (new with object mask)
  • [project filename] .prlock file

This is just becoming too much clutter around anybody's own workflow and folder structure.

 

Proposal:

Move all data folders into a single folder “Premiere Data Files” or similar appropriate name.
For logical reasons .prlock and perhaps .prin can remain next to project.
 

    1 reply

    Stan Jones
    Community Expert
    Stan JonesCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 2, 2026

    ​@Shebbe,

    I am sympathetic to the spirit of your suggestion. The .prin file resulted in “clutter” complaints, particularly where a user was doing version control by creating multiple project files. But some types of clutter don’t appear to bother me.

    Most of your suggestion can be addressed by the Scratch disk locations in project settings, and the addition of the Mask folder location there. These locations appear to be sticky from the last project created. Or you could use a template?

    Stan

     

      Shebbe
      Community Expert
      ShebbeCommunity ExpertAuthor
      Community Expert
      March 2, 2026

      It’s still problematic. Having Scratch Disk locations set to Same As Project is beneficial. But if a user wants to put them all into a subfolder next to project this means that now suddenly for each project the location needs to be defined before using a template project file. It only moves the problem to the user. 

       

      It theory doesn't matter if someone's workflow is to dump all that data into a dedicated “scratch disk” and never look back but I think having the data next to the project is in many cases much more desirable.

      Perhaps an even beter solution would be to provide users with better control on how data and filepaths work. If the user can specify path relative to project you could even put it in a folder that lives higher up in the structure and also put it levels deeper.

       

      e.g where %P means the Premiere project file.

      • %P/ → identical to “Same as Project” option
      • %P/Premiere  Data Files/ → inside 1 folder next to the project file as my initial suggestion
      • %P/../Caches/ → goes one folder up first, then creates folder Caches and puts the data there

      With such a mechanism in place, users could decide themselves how it works and still make use of a single template project file on each project without the need to redefine these paths every time.

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