We highly recommend not using your system drive unless you have no other alternatives. It's important to note that when you set up Photoshop, you will have the option to assign the scratch disk to the drive of your choice. When working with large images and lots of layers, Photoshop is secretly chewing up your drive space by rapidly creating a mountain of project temp and cache files. Photoshop allows you to assign several scratch disks: that way, it has more space for storing temporary files at its disposal. Scratch disk in Photoshop is your hard drive space used by the app as virtual memory when there is not enough RAM to complete a task. But rest assured that the info we cover will apply to most programs that rely on using a scratch disk.

After all, it is the most common application. This is where temporary files are stored and accessed from.įor this guide, we are focusing our laser sights on Photoshop. When you use programs like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, they require a working space called virtual memory or cache memory. Keep on reading to find out the following:īefore we highlight some solutions, it would be a good idea to have at least a general sense of what a scratch disk actually is. If you've stumbled on this page because you've experienced the full scratch disk issue, you're in luck: we're going to show you how to resolve your scratch disk problem easily and, as a bonus, keep your computer clean and performing at its best. The most common error is Photoshop's refusal to open, along with the message stating either 'Could not complete your request because the scratch disks are full' or 'Could not initialize Photoshop because scratch disks are full.' If you regularly work in programs like Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Photoshop, you've probably encountered Photoshop scratch disk errors. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

How to manage disk space on mac