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thanks. i'll see if i can figure out how to use it.
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I think you're going about this the wrong way. This isn't where you save space. Actual space freed up is negligible, it won't make a dent.
Clean out your user account instead. That's where all the junk accumulates. If you really want to clean house, there is an indispensable tool which shows you exactly what's filling up your drives, and where it is. Can't recall what the Mac version is called, but here's how it looks on Windows:
Oh, first run a disk cleanup from your operating system. It can be surprisingly effective.
Camera profile folders take up more than 590 MB of harddrive space. There are 355 separate profiles in here from Panasonic, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Sigma, RICOH, Pentax, Olympus, Leica... and because it is ProgramData it forces itself onto the C: drive.
I only have two cameras that have profiles here. If I were permitted to only download what I needed, this whole folder could be 2 folders for a total of less than 4 MB. If I purchase a new one, I can download the relevant profile.
Why should anyone keep over half a gig of completely unnecessary files? Even the most avid collector is unlikely to have every single entry level camera in every brand. This seems to be a massive case of Adobe's unrepentant software bloat.
Just noticed that there's another 420 MB of LensProfiles one folder over..... literally 2,947 different camera lenses from 53 different brands of still camera, video camera, drone, cellphone, etc. While I am a Samsung user, I have to wonder how iPhone users feel about having 174 different varieties of Samsung Galaxy S6, S7, S8, S9, S20, S21, S22, S23, S24, Note 20, Z Fold, etc for each of our variations the standard Galaxy, the Galaxy Plus, or the Galaxy Edge, and each of those devices many, many lenses and shooting modes (standard and Raw).
Does every single user need to have both the standard and RAW shooting profiles for every ultrawide rear, wide rear, ultrawide angle front, wide angle front, standard, telephoto rear, and super telephoto rear lens on the Galaxy S23+ phone? If I were to send them a photo I took on such a phone, wouldn't it be easy for the software to download the single profile for the single lens that corresponds with the picture that I sent?
Instead we have over a gigabyte of lens and camera profiles stored on every single system where Adobe CameraRaw has been installed. Every design shop with multiple employees who work on different aspects of a project each have to have all of these profiles loaded up on every single laptop, desktop, workstation, etc in their studio when they may not even work with RAW images directly and there's not even the option to uninstall the CameraRaw app from their computers?
At least my User Profile is full of data that I created and chose to download... the stuff you all are saying "No, no, don't look behind the Great and Powerful Adobe's curtain" and "This isn't where you save space. Actual space freed up is negligible" are files that literally all but less than 10 MB of 1.13 GB is of use to me or likely the vast majority of other users....
And every time we download an update all of these gigabytes have to be transferred, reinstalled, electricity needed to send them, carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. For what? To save an Adobe programmer the week it would take to create a package manager to only download camera and lens profiles as-needed?
Another 500 MB of just UninstallXML files going back to 2017 that were never cleaned up during the installation of each version update multiple times per year.... 1,300+ files, none bigger than 5 MB individually..... Yet, so far I've found more than 1.5 gigabytes of files that could easily have been limited to less than 50 MB on my C: drive.
Everything I had posted before this post was not in my User Account.... Uninstallers were in the Program FIles folder... Camera and Lens Profiles were buried in Program Data folder.....
Here's another 400 MB in a InDesign Version 14.0 cache is buried in the AppData folder in my user profile.... so we're up to 2 gigabytes on my C drive just ... My User Profile is only 40 gigs....
It's all just littered all over the drive sometimes in program specific folders, sometimes in temp caches that aren't adequatedly cleansed before an updater abandons them in place, sometimes just thousands of tiny files a typical user will only need a handful of, but installed and taking up gigs of space needlessly so that Adobe doesn't have to think about being good resource steward. It seems like the company has no sense of how 1,993 files cached between 2018 and 2019 between 500 KB and 10 KB might still add up to 400 MB that there is no documentation regarding whether deletion will corrupt some process that might be cataloguing these... Adobe initiates 13 programs during computer start up to check licensing, to check for updates, to sync cloud storage, and to catch crashes .... couldn't one of these be dedicated to cleaning up after itself if they insist on using resources 100% of the time?
The capriciousness with storage and memory is really gauling when it would be so easy to add a set of garbage collection utilities to prevent this kind of rampant waste. It's really unprofessional and extradorinarily frustrating for software that costs so much to expect us to clean up after it as well.
700 MB in a "links" folder buried in the AppData > Roaming > Adobe > Creative Cloud Libraries > LIBS > XXXXXXXXXX_AdobeID > link folder.... all of which accrued in 2021...
This set of Adobe folders alone is 3.9 GB of my AppData folder.... Why do I get the sense that Adobe is a major cause of my C drive storage issues? How is it possible that all of this is cached despite clearing my caches repeatedly and routinely?
Wow and that 700 MB is of Adobe's sample graphics crap that's shown as you open programs.... in the Roaming profile....
How many folders are we supposed to delve into, how deeply?
Animate2023 .... 1.1 GB in a folder called Coachmark....
checks if my license is valid multiple times per second.
By @philc30713433
The license only needs to be confirmed once every 30 days, so I don't know where you're seeing that.
I just did some book-keeping, and the sum total of all Adobe files on my machine (that's a full CC with 8 or 10 apps) seems to be somewhere in the vicinity of 30 GB. The Photoshop scratch file alone - history states for open documents - will require at least ten times that.
In other words, a little perspective goes a long way.
As we've pointed out many times: These are professional grade applications optimized for speed and efficiency. This needs to work in high pressure situations. They are not optimized for limited hardware resources, that cannot be a priority.
As for the background processes - all advanced software has this. They are just lifted out of each individual application and centralized in the CC app. They do not impact performance in any way. I've taken a closer look at this before, and almost all of these processes consume exactly zero resources, until they are called upon. Then they go back to sleep.
There is lots of good advice out there on saving space on a Windows boot drive, and much larger file sizes that the sort of camera raw support files the OP mentioned. WinDirStat is an incredibly useful tool for finding those files, but it is not the whole story. e.g. are you able to fit a second drive so that you can relocate standard Windows folders off the boot drive?
Right clicking folders like Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Downloads etc. and choosing Properties will have a Location tab, and as you can imagine, this can remove a huge load from the boot drive.
Turning off hibernate can save a big chuck of drive space, and save you grief because Hibernate is known to freeze systems on wake up. I have not used it since Windows XP!
Note: I have not read right through this page, but it looks OK
https://www.windowscentral.com/best-ways-to-free-hard-drive-space-windows-10
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