Changing scratch disk In Photoshop

[megan1913]

Hi, I've just began to use adobe creative cloud and photoshop on my macbook pro a couple days ago and have already ran into issues with space on my scratch disk. When I go to the preferences menu to change my disk, I only have one option to use.

What are other methods of storage I can use and how to I add them into photoshop?  Also will I have to apply this to other adobe apps or does the scratch disk only relate to photoshop?

It is hard to work on my photographt assignments when I am having issues with the scratch drive (sometimes photoshop will not open at all and I need to restart my entire laptop) so any advice solutions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

(Edit: I'm surprised to have gotten replies so quickly! Thank you!)

(Final note: I've solved my issue! I have an external hard drive with TONS of space to use when I'm using photshop. Thanks again to those who replied and helped me figure this out!)

{Title modified by Moderator}

[nikunj.m]

Hi there, 

Scratch disk is basically the amount of free space on the main drive of your computer that Photoshop requires to Create necessary temporary files.

You can check the details mentioned in the article linked below.

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/photoshop/using/scratch-disks-preferences.html

To use an external hard drive as a scratch disk with the Macbook Pro, you would need a hard drive which is in the FAT32 file format.

Regards

Nikunj

[megan1913]

Thank you, the article helps a lot

[Chuck Uebele]

If your regular hard drive doesn't have enough space, I would get a fast external drive that you can plug in, when you work on PS. I've done that.

[megan1913]

I already have a good external drive so I'll have to try using it for this

[Joely]

Which model and configuration exactly is your «macbook pro»???

Sounds strange to me, after a couple of days to run out of space…

[megan1913]

I have the 2019 macbook pro with 250 gigs, and I have only had this laptop for a couple months so I'm not having issues with space on my actual laptop, but I guess I don't have enough available for photoshop to use

[D Fosse]

You really need to free up a lot of disk space ASAP, or you will soon have much bigger problems than Photoshop. When you get that message the disk is almost filled to capacity.

The scratch disk is a portion of your disk that Photoshop uses to store temporary working data. Photoshop needs this because it moves very large amounts of data around, much more than almost any other application. Without disk space for this, Photoshop simply can't function.

This has been a very frequent question since the first generation of SSDs, which were very small. System disks tend to fill up over time (mostly under your user account), and by now most of these early 80 or 120 GB disks are full. You really should have at least 100-150 GB free space just for the Photoshop scratch disk, in addition to everything else.

[megan1913]

So will freeing up my laptop storage free up space for the scratch disk?