Please Help Me Setup An External Drive As A Scratch Disc To Enable Photoshop

[Heidi Bransby]

I would be so grateful for someone patient enough to help me setup my external drive on my MAC as a scratch disc so that I can open Photoshop. Thank you.

[Ged_Traynor]

@Heidi Bransby have a look here

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

What's preventing you from using the main disk as the scratch disk

[Heidi Bransby]

Hi Ged. Thanks for your response. My main disc seems to not have sufficient space. It's a brand new machine, so I'm perplexed about that. I've attempted to follow the recommendations to setup an external drive as a scratch disk, but I can't access the options suggested, such as a preferences. Here's a screenshot for how far I can go. I feel like a fool right now. Usually I am able to work around things like this, but not today.

[D Fosse]

Forgive me if I'm jumping to a conclusion here. But if your system drive is so low on space that Photoshop can't start because of insufficient scratch disk space - then you will soon have much bigger problems than Photoshop.

This message won't come up until you're down to 20 GB or so. But that is already way too low just in terms of normal machine maintenance.

Using an external drive as PS scratch disk will work, but it's slow, inefficient and cumbersome.

Here's a rule of thumb: A normal configuration of operating system and applications should take up around 80-120 GB. Much more than that, and it's time for a thorough housecleaning.

All your applications will dump all kinds of stuff in your user account, and much of it is dead meat that you won't ever need again. Start with a disk cleanup from your operating system. Empty the trash. Move all your documents and images to the external. That's what you use an external drive for, not by running system functions on it.

Even with a 250 GB system drive, there should normally be room to have your Photoshop scratch disk there.

[Heidi Bransby]

Hello and thank you for your interesting reply. I am currently transferring all my data off my MAC onto the external hard drive as suggested. Thank you. I was under the impression that a scratch disk was ideally an external hard drive, and hadn't known it could be one's hard drive itself. 

[jane-e]

@Heidi Bransby 

Now that you are moving files to the external drive (removable media), we need to warn you not to open or save files directly to that drive. Move a file to your HD, then open it. Save it on the HD, then move it back. Otherwise there is a risk of corrupting the file.

Details here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/networks-removable-media-photoshop.html

Jane