Photoshop not allowing me to use available drive space for scratch disk - why?

[Rachel5EAF]

My internal drive on my iMac shows 500GB of available space.  Yet in Photoshop it shows only 163GB of available space for scratch disk.  I've Purged All cache space.  Yet it remains limited like this.  Why?  Never had this problem before.

[nikunj.m]

Hi,

We're sorry about the trouble with Photoshop. Would you mind sharing the version of Photoshop you're using along with your computers macOS version? Have you created any partitions on your iMac's hard drive?

You can try to reset the preferences of Photoshop using the steps mentioned here: https://adobe.ly/2Qzc0K3

Please backup your settings prior to resetting the preferences. You can check: https://adobe.ly/2vNz6FG

For more details on scratch disk, you can check: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/scratch-disks-preferences.html

Let us know how it goes!

Regards,

Nikunj

[kevin stohlmeyer]

Have you given Photoshop full disk permissions in the Mac OS security preferences?

[Rachel5EAF]

Yes I did.  I ended up on the phone for about an hour with Apple.  They couldn't figure it out and recommended I reinstall Big Sur...which took about 3 hours.  After that, it showed an increase of about 400GB available but not the full space.  Strangely (or not), if I look at any other external drive, it shows the full space available.  It's just the internal Mac drive that I have the problem with.  Anyway, I ended up buying an external SSD to work from.  tks.