Scratch Disks full, can't open PS to clear them, nothing works

Question

I have been using photoshop for many years, since 2018. Never once have I ever had this issue.

I use a mac and apparently there's no storage available in my scratch disk. It's using my Mac system drive which has 4 gigabytes of space available. So I deleted all of the temporary files in the TMP folder, which yielded zero results.

I can't clear my cache because I can't even open photoshop. I can't uncheck or check that little box. I can't interact with anything other than the little arrows, and the 'OK' and 'Cancel ' buttons, which universally just close photoshop. I can't use the menu bar as there are no available options other than to quit. I can't even add another scratch disk if I could.

I don't know the issue. Possibly it could be that I have too many PSD files?? I don't know, I have under 100. Additionally, I do have a habit of force-quitting Photoshop so perhaps that could be the issue. I really need to be able to fix this otherwise I'll have to cancel my subscription and stop using the product.

D Fosse · Answer

You need to clear out space on your system drive immediately. You don't need to open Photoshop for that. Move/delete everything you can.

With a system drive that full, you will soon have bigger problems than Photoshop. Your whole machine can freeze up at any moment. 4 GB is nothing.

The Photoshop scratch disk is not a Photoshop setting. It is real, physical disk space. Raster image editing handles huge amounts of data, much more than any RAM you may have installed, and it all has to go somewhere. For any serious work, you need to have 100 - 500 GB free space, in some circumstances even more.

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