Tried to Move Photoshop 2011 from C drive to D drive

[sharon_3812]

Tried to move Adobe Photoshop 2011 from C drive to D drive, because I kept getting notice not suffient space on C drive.  Looked on line for ways to do it, used Cut and Paste, Cut from C drive to paste to D drive.  It starts to load, but freezes said I need to reload lic. on Photo Editor, but can not find that file anywhere.  My C drive is only 220GB, and only have 1 GB left on Dell XPS8930  Help!  Wife 

[D Fosse]

Don't attempt this, it won't work and you will just break something. It's not just the program files, there's also registry keys that need to be correctly set.

In any case the Photoshop installation files are insignificant in terms of space, a mere 2 or 3 GB. You will most likely free up ten times that just by emptying the recycle bin.

The first thing you need to do is run disk cleanup in Windows. Check all the options to remove as much as possible.

Do you have anything under the My Documents folder? Chances are you do if you haven't paid particular attention. Move it all over to D.

Are you using Bridge? Purge the cache, and move the Bridge cache over to D in Bridge preferences. There can be tens of GB in the Bridge cache. 

[ExUSA]

Honestly your best bet would be to find a good local computer shop and pay them to install a bigger drive, move files to an external, and update your computer software. Be aware that support for Windows 10 ends in a week so you may be better off looking into buying a new Windows 11 computer instead of investing in the old one.

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

Getting a larger C: system volume is inevitable, and you can’t avoid it by moving just Photoshop off the C drive. The reason is basic math. There are many complications related to what you're trying to do, but we'll start with the fact that you said your C drive has only 1GB left.

Ifyou read the Photoshop system requirements, the minimum free space should be 10GB, and they recommend 100GB. That's because you need space not just for the application folder, but also for the large temporary files that are required while Photoshop is running. But on my computer, the Photoshop application folder is less than 7GB. (It's a Mac but I bet the size on Windows isn't too different.) So if you move the entire Photoshop application folder off the C drive, you probably won’t free up enough room to meet the minimum free space of 10GB. To meet the recommended level of free space, you would have to free up 10x more space.

As I said, part of the free space requirement is about temporary files, and that poses another challenge for you: Temporary files are almost always created (by any application) on the system volume, which is your C drive. So even if you’re able to move the Photoshop application to another drive, when you start Photoshop it will, as usual, create its temporary and cache files on the system volume anyway, just as any other similar application will do. So you still have to clear off a lot more space than just moving the Photoshop application folder.

One reason you are having trouble with copying and pasting is because that is the wrong way to install an application on another volume. For one thing, you're only thinking about the application, and not all of the Photoshop support files stored at this path on the C system volume:

C: Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe

Creative Cloud also has its own processes and settings stored on the C drive too. There are many of these related files, possibly hundreds, but it sounds like you haven't accounted for them. But you can't move them anyway, because they must exist in

C: Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming

and won't work from a non-system volume.

On my computer, that folder is over 15GB, because it contains a lot of Adobe temporary cache files.

If you really do want Photoshop to be on a non-C drive, you can do that, but only by reinstalling. For example, on my Mac, the Adobe Creative Cloud installer provides an option for which volume I want to install on, as shown in the picture below. I assume this option is also available in Windows. If you wanted to try it, you should use the Creative Cloud desktop app to first uninstall Photoshop, change the installation location setting, and then reinstall Photoshop and it should go there. Repeat for all Adobe apps on your computer.

But again, this will not change the location of files in 

C: Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming

because those can only be stored on the C drive.

Other than reinstalling Photoshop on your D drive, the only other thing you can change to an external volume is the Photoshop temporary scratch file, which can grow quite large. Like the other temporary files it defaults to the C drive, but you can set it to another drive in Photoshop Preferences, Scratch Disk.

In my opinion, general creative applications such as (but not just) Photoshop work best if you can keep 100GB or more free at all times. Personally I aim for more than 200GB free in case I need to edit large files, which create larger temporary cache/scratch files. Windows itself needs room for its virtual memory swap files and other caches. If you only have 1GB free, even if Photoshop wasn't having problems you would eventually have a problem with something else.

Keep in mind that a fast 1TB SSD (over 4x the capacity of your current C drive) is well under $100 today. Today I saw some for as low as $50. A small price to pay for not having any hassles with low free space.

[sharon_3812]

Thank you so much, Conrad and everyone else!  We really appreciate your detailed, informative, helpful replies.  We ended up purchasing a new tower with 2TB on C drive plus updated PhotoShop Elements to 2026.   My husband is still getting everything set up but your replies helped us understand the issues and address them appropriately.  Thank you!    

[Nancy OShea]

For future reference, the basic system requirements for PS Elements 2026.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/system-requirements.html