P: How to fix Photoshop Scratch Disks Full Error?

[samarthsrivastav]

I am running Photoshop CC on my MacBook Air with macOS Sierra. Every time I attempt to open Photoshop through any means, the following message appears: "Could not initialize Photoshop because the scratch disks are full", and Photoshop does not open. I tried clearing space from my Mac in general including several GB worth of apps and removing several cache files, but nothing seems to work. I also tried holding down the command and option keys to reveal the Scratch Disk Preferences, and it lets me select the Startup and MacIntosh HD. Again, nothing worked. Anyone know how to fix this message, and/or clear scratch disk space?

{Moderator note: Edited the thread title PS-65057}

[Nancy OShea]

Well said!  🤣

[PAWU]

So just make an i.e. \TEMP2 folder on that concerning harddrive, and fill it up with some stuff until the free space is less than ca. 950 GB.
That´s it. Works like a charm for me.

By @acrobatica

That's the solution I looked for my 16Tb (14Tb free) disk. Just one question: can I take any some stuff, or do I need to use specific some stuff? And a second question: do I need to hit the 950Gb exactly, or may it also be 940 or 960Gb?

[acrobatica]

arrrrrh sorry, you´re right, it´s not that easy ! 

I found out now that only Justean TumBerleak-MP3´s (TB) will work as stuff for this solution.

So you will have to dupilcate with renaming some of those files until  the 950,00 GB jam is pumped up

(you can enumerate them by hand, one by one) 

Won´t work with 950,12  or 949,87 GB, so you have to hit that limit exactly.

Another way may be to partition the hard disk with the well-known ChainSaw-Tools from MakeAfee

so that you gain one drive under 1 TB, but I never tried this. You´ll do this on your own risk.

[kizito35622708wmag]

i had the same problem when my local disk space left was 5.61GB. After creating more free space now totaling to 11GB, the program was able to open

[D Fosse]

11 GB is still nothing. 11 GB can be gone in seconds. And then you quickly have bigger problems than Photoshop.

You need to think on a whole different level. A bare minimum for Photoshop to work efficiently is 100 GB - but my advice is 250 GB and up. Then you're reasonably safe.

Advanced 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, aka scratch disk.

Every history state, for every open document, potentially adds the full starting file size. Smart objects and other advanced functions have additional overhead.

[Ranjana366734612p5l]

The inches >  pixels helped thank you so much 🙂

[Benjyc247361610722529]

This was ages ago but, I've just gone and got a Mac today. I have 450gb storage free and I then Installed photoshop and it came up with "scratch disk full" I then go onto my storage and my storage is full. Why? Why's photoshop using 450gb of storage???

[Lumigraphics]

Photoshop likely isn't using 450Gb of scratch space. Go the the Apple menu, About This Mac. Depending on OS version it may have a storage tab or you may have a More Info button that takes you to the Settings app where you can see info about storage. Disk Utility also can give you info.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-storage-settings-mchl3d437fbc/mac

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/get-detailed-information-about-a-disk-dskutl1005/mac

You can also use an app like OmniDiskSweeper, DaisyDisk, or GrandPerspective to analyze disk usage.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more

https://www.insanelymac.com/blog/best-disk-space-analyzers-mac/

[Eric38978183mabp]

photoshop 7 is so old it fails with that message if your scratch disk is bigger than 1TB.  Nothing you can do but find a smaller disk or upgrade.

[3xp0Sure]

this creative cloud driven revised photoshop is starting to look really comparable to the web browser equivelent and potential successor to photoshop imo. gimp is also completly free and runs withought exspansive program disk size needs. adobe needs to remember that this program runs in a partition or fixed storage size . exspanding storage shouldnt effect its startup. cs6 is the exact same program. so maybe i should end my subscription after paying thirdy dollars monthly for the past two years on a eleven year old macbook that still prefourms excelently and has more than enough of a spec list for photo editing in a laptop. an i7 16gb and intel onboard graphics are more than enough for future proofing the creative suite photoshop version - that was better. so im done!