Inspiring

Answered

deleting unnecessary cameraRaw files

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
June 3, 2022
3 replies
4565 views

Hi, I'm trying to clean up my hard drive by deleting unnecessary files. i've notice there are a lot of camera profiles & camera raw files in the Application support libray and i don't really use a camera. are they associated with photoshop? can these be deleted without harm. are there any other unnecessary adobe camera centric files that can be deleted?

macOS

Correct answer martoons

@JohanElzenga wrote:

Disk Utility is a utility to format and/or repair disks. It does not, and never did, deal with individual files. Use the Apple Store app to search for file utilities. As I'm typing this on my iPad, I cannot give you examples, except that I remember a utility called Daisy Disk.

I'd recommend the free Onyx utility.

https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html
https://www.macworld.com/article/352902/onyx-review-macos.html

thanks. i'll see if i can figure out how to use it.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

On a mac you can go to Apple>About This Mac>Storage>Manage>Reduce Clutter>Review Files and from there you can see where and what large files are taking up space.

(this doesn't include system files)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

That is indeed very useful too, but do remember that this will only show you big individual files. You may have a huge cache folder full of relatively small files, that could all be deleted. The 'Review Files' function won't show this folder.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

TheDigitalDog

Inspiring

The documents you speak of are not large, plus, every time you reinstall Photoshop/ACR, they will be placed back there. Ignore them.

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

philc30713433

Known Participant

This ignores Adobe's horrendous habits with regards to storage space. There is absolutely no need to require every user to install all of these profiles. These should be downloaded on an as-needed basis and be limited to only those profiles that correspond to images presentn on the current system.

Same with tutorial or product featurettes, Adobe just drops gigabytes worth of files that will be used at most once and more typically not at all into storage. Why?

This is unacceptable behavior from any other software company. And yet, for some reason Adobe acolytes act as if these are necessary offerings to some higher power. The software costs enough as it is, do they really need to bloat it out with thousands of brushes, textures, camera profiles, tutorials, swatches, and other massive libraries that are completely irrelevant to many users. Why isn't all of this on an as-needed basis? I'm sick of having to go digging around to figure out why my AppData, a ProgramData, or temporary folder is refusing to release hundreds of megs if not gigabytes worth of data that is not being used at all.

Just turning on my computer Adobe loads no less that 13 processes and checks if my license is valid multiple times per second. Are they going to lose so much revenue by only checking license validity once an hour? Do they really need 4 notification handlers? A content synchronizer when I don't use their cloud storage features? A crash processor that seems to be awaiting a crash, not simply called on an as-needed basis? Four user interface helpers for the Creative Cloud app? Why does that app even need to run at all other than when updating software? I don't need something to pop up when I turn on my computer to remind me that I have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, etc. They're all stored on my taskbar for quick access....

D Fosse

Community Expert

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.

D Fosse

Community Expert

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.

philc30713433

Known Participant

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.

D Fosse

Community Expert

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.

If you go into your user account, any Adobe folders for earlier versions can be deleted. If the application isn't installed, it doesn't need anything in the user account.

See above for WinDirStat. Highly recommended.

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