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Known Participant
November 14, 2023
Question

C Drive Space is Shrinking as I run the Photoshop Actions

  • November 14, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 937 views

Hello everyone!

 

For some of my work, I need to run Photoshop actions a lot. As I am running actions a lot over many photoshops my C drive is getting full. How could I free up C Drive?

 

Thank you!

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3 replies

silk-m
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2023

If you can't choose another scratch disk for now, but want to free up C Drive, add "Edit-Purge-All" to your actions.
It may be possible to release it.

--Susumu Iwasaki
Trevor.Dennis
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2023
quote

If you can't choose another scratch disk for now, but want to free up C Drive, add "Edit-Purge-All" to your actions.
It may be possible to release it.


By @silk-m

 

We get a few posts like this and experiment to see what works, and IME Purge All just doesn't release memory.  In fact Photoshop is a bit greedy with RAM nowadays.  It creates more more temp files on the scratch drive, and is a bit of a beggar when it comes to giving it back.  You can close all open files and still have tens of gigabytes tied up with Photoshop temp files.

 

What you also have to do is keep an eye out for orphaned temp files left behind if Photoshop does not close properly.  With Photoshop closed, any Photoshop temp files left can safely be deleted.

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2023
quoteYou can close all open files and still have tens of gigabytes tied up with Photoshop temp files.
 
By @Trevor.Dennis

 

That's as designed.  All memory, real or virtual, is held as long as the application is open. It will be recycled and reused as necessary. You can test this for yourself. The "Photoshop Tempxxxxx" files remain when you close the document, and disappear when you close Photoshop.

 

If anything remains when Photoshop is closed, that's either because the application doesn't shut down properly (which can happen occasionally), or perhaps a permissions issue.

 

One thing you can do if you're low on scratch disk space, is to cut history states down to 1. That will dramatically reduce the need for scratch.

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2023

As Bojan says. You just don't have enough free disk space for the Photoshop scratch disk.

 

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.

TanvirnwuAuthor
Known Participant
November 14, 2023

Thank you for the information, can I delete the files from the scratch disk to free up the space?  

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2023

You need more free space, that's all. Clear out as much as you can.

 

The scratch disk is temporary data. It's cleared automatically when it's no longer needed.

 

You can put the scratch disk on another physical drive, but it sounds like you're so low on space that you need to do some housecleaning anyway.

Bojan Živković11378569
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 14, 2023

Let me guess, you have set the C drive as a scratch disk from Preferences > Scratch Disks, right? Any disk can be set as a scratch disk, but it is desirable to set an SSD fast disk.

TanvirnwuAuthor
Known Participant
November 14, 2023

You are right. 

can I delete the files from the scratch disk to free up the space? Will that create any issue?