Internal storage used by Adobe on iPad Air 5

[Ray David]

I've noticed that on my iPad Air 5, that PS and something called Adobe Inc is taking up a large amount of my internal storage.  At one point it was using 27g of my 64g of internal storage.  LR was also using about 10g, but I found out how to delete it's cache files, but PS has no such feature. I called Adobe support and was told that the only way to delete the cache files from PS & Adobe Inc was to uninstall all Adobe apps.  This seems to be a ridiculous solution to the problem.  Perhaps this should've been posted as a feature request, but it seems more like a bug/technical issue to me. 

[jane-e]

@Ray David 

I don't know why your numbers are so large, but am posting mine for comparison when the Photoshop team looks at it.

Jane

[Ray David]

I'm new to the ipad (I'm a PC user), having recently purchased an iPad Air 5 for editing photos.  I have 64g of internal storage and I've noticed that Adobe is using about 27g of that.  See the attached image.  PS is using 15.16g and Adobe Inc. is using 12.44g.  Is there a way to control this?  Should I be worried that I'm going to run out of internal storage?  LR had be using almost 10g itself, but I found out how to delete LR's cache so that fixed that. I can't find anything like that for PS and I'm not even sure what Adobe Inc even is.  In addition to PS &LR, I have PS Express & Adobe CC installed. No other adobe apps.  I'm not storing any images internally, at least not that I'm aware of.  I'm still learning how to navigate on the iPad and I'm a bit confused as to what PS is doing when saving images. 

[Duplicate posts merged. Please post once; then add to current thread]

[abigskyguy]

My LR & PS storage (same settings page) showed 703mb and 630mb respectively. So, I made some LR settings changes - gave access to All Photos in iPad App settings and then imported a bunch of photos from the Photos App. Went back to the storage page and LR had gone up to 1.58GB. I imagine PS is the same. It appears that LR/PS actually create copies of the files within those apps, shrinking storage X # of Adobe Apps i.e.) 4 Adobe Apps = source image + 4 copies(?). That's surprising since it seems that they could just keep a thumbnail directory and pull the file from its source when you begin to work on it. Maybe some Adobe Apps share files?  

I had to manually import the images but there may a LR setting that allows for auto-imports from the Photos and/or other apps into LR & PS. You may have that turned in one or all Adobe Apps or you possibly accidentally imported a bunch of images into these apps at some point. Another possibility is that I think when you first install the LR App, at least, it asks about access and import permissions. I'd check LR/PS settings for auto-import and if can't find that setting, maybe watch a video re: installing the current version of LR/PS and see if you maybe gave auto-import permissions upon install which, apparently, you can't change after install(?). Only option would then be to reinstall App(s) and withhold any auto-import requests made.

Btw, as long as you have copies of the images you want somewhere else, deleting any app will delete ALL of it's data so no need to go through each app and go through deletion process.

Also btw, Settings App (iPad) > LR App (list at bottom of sidebar) > Photos > Selecting "All Photos", does not result in all photos in Photos App being imported into LR App, so, there must be some setting in the LR App (or on install) that allows import (auto and/or manual). 

You stated that you don't have photos anywhere else on your iPad. That makes me think it could be a cloud storage issue? Possibly you had Adobe iCloud storage and downloaded them? Or, tied your Adobe account to a another cloud service that it pulled images from? If your cloud storage expires, I think they send a copy of your file to your device automatically.

That's my take.

[Ray David]

Thanks for the reply. I should've replied after I contacted Adobe support, but I was basically told that the only way of clearing PS's cache files is to uninstall/reinstall the app.  He agreed that was a ridiculous solution and wasn't aware if Adobe has any current plans on fixing that. However, that doesn't explain the mystery of where these files are.  I reached those initial storage totals after editing several photos to see if using a iPad was a feasible solution for mobile editing.  I've concluded that it is, but with some slight hiccups, ie internal storage.   Also, I should note that I've never purposely imported any photos to my internal storage. They go from the card reader directly to an external SSD.  I do have the auto import in LR turned off as well. Neither app as much in the way of settings, so I don't think I missed anything. 

One of the photos I edited was a 14 layer lunar eclipse photo which ended up being just over 1g in size. One thing I quickly realized is that PS creates a new photo every time you send one to PS from LR. With a 1g file, that adds up quickly. In LR those eventually end up as smart previews once it uploads the new originals to the cloud.  Then you flush the remaining cache files by going to App settings> Local storage> Clear cache.  Unfortunately PS is still storing those files somewhere and I haven't been able to find them anywhere. This may be because I'm new to the iPad and just don't know how to find them. There's no Windows explorer type app and the Files app doesn't let you poke around the storage drive very much. 

Yesterday I deleted any of those files that showed up under recents in PS and again uninstalled/reinstalled PS & LR.  I sent the latest version of it from LR to PS and instead of choosing "send to LR" after I was done, I decided to export it to LR instead.  This was an attempt to find a way to continue to edit the original photo without creating a new one. After LR was finished uploading to the cloud, LR shows the the original photo is stored locally and in the cloud.  LR's cache size is 1.12g and this won't clear no matter how many time I try. I have 5 other versions of that photo that were created from LR to PS and then returned to LR. Each of these is only stored locally as a smart preview once the original is uploaded to the cloud. So somewhere on my iPad there is at least 1 1g photo that I can't find outside of LR.  I can't find it in Files or Photos.  I have no idea where it is, yet it's taking up 1g of storage space. This is the mystery I referred to above.  Again, this could be just because I don't know how to find things on the iPad. I've looked, but I can't find anyone, including Adobe, that has any videos that really go into how everything works when working between LR & PS, particularly what is going on with local storage.  

I decided to file a bug report on PS not being able to flush its cache without uninstalling/reinstalling it as that really is ridiculous!  Other than that, it would be great to find a detailed explanation of how all of this actually works. The good news for me at least is that since my iPad is new I'm able to exchange it for one with 256g of internal storage. That should lessen the issue quite a bit.  

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@Ray David honestly I'd say attempting to work on a 1 gig file on an iPad Air is risky at best. That's a fairly substantial file size to be using in the mobile app.

[Ray David]

No risk at all.  The whole point was to see just how much I could do on an iPad Air 5 and it handles it great.  I started with the base layer and just kept adding the other 13 layers until I had recreated the image the same way I did on my PC.  I can bring the finished image back into PS as many times as I want and edit it as much as I want without any problem at all.  The only issue is that PS, and whatever Adobe Inc is, refuses to flush it's caches files.  This was confirmed by Adobe tech support.  With only 64g of storage space, until my new iPad arrives, it wouldn't take very long before I'd have to uninstall/reinstall all Adobe apps.  This is just a ridiculous solution to the problem.  Since I tend to work on large files, this is a big issue for me.

[jane-e]

"until my new iPad arrives"

Please let us know if this solves it for you...or not. I went with 1TB because I worried about going with something too small, but you can see in my screenshot that I'm barely using any of it.

Jane

[Ray David]

I'll post back, but since 256g is the max internal storage you can get for an iPad Air, this is just going to reduce the number of times I have to uninstall/reinstall the apps.  In your case you've already used more than the 64g I currently have.  I really didn't want to spend the money on an iPad Pro which is why I went with the air.  Other than the storage issue, it's working great.

[Ray David]

Here's an interesting update. Yesterday I did some work on this photo in PS and exported back to LR instead of choosing "send to Lightroom" and I reported that LR was storing the original image both locally and in the cloud. It stayed that way until this morning and now LR is only storing a smart preview locally. Not sure why that changed, but at least that's 1g I finally got back!

[Ray David]

So here's an update after using my new iPad (256g) for a couple of weeks. 

I've done a fair amount up editing using both LR & PS.  So far I've only used about 40g of internal storage so now having 256g total, I haven't even come close to running out of space.  I think it will be quite a while before I have to worry about that. Adobe still needs to address the issue of not having any way to flush the PS & Adobe Inc cache files w/o uninstalling all Adobe apps. 

One thing I recently found out is that when you import photos into LR on an iPad, LR first copies the photos to the internal storage and then imports them into LR.  This means that you need enough free space on the iPad's internal storage to fit the amount of photos you're importing. I just imported about 20g of photos into LR using my iPad and now I'm at 60g used.  This is only temporary if you want it to be, but if I still had only a 64g iPad, I wouldn't have been able to import too many more photos.  If anyone else is considering an iPad Air for photo editing, get the 256g version!  What LR does is store the originals both locally and in the cloud.  Initially it shows the entire amount of storage used as "Locally Stored Copies". As these are uploaded to the cloud, you'll see that amount decreasing and the "Cached files" size increasing.  This is under App Settings/Local Storage in LR. Once all the photos have been uploaded to the cloud, your "Cached files" size will be close to the amount of the photos that were uploaded and the "Locally Stored copies should be very low. If you look at each photo in LR, you'll see that the original is stored both locally and in the cloud. This is when you can manually delete LR's cache files to save space and then LR will download smart previews to replace the originals. I read somewhere that LR may clear some or all of the Cached files on its own if space is needed to import more photos.