Here are five safe and effective methods for clearing your scratch disk in Photoshop: 1. Change Scratch Disk Location. By default, Photoshop uses your computer’s hard drive as its primary scratch disk location. From time to time it's a good idea to clear cached files from your Mac's drives. Adobe provides a way to do this from within Photoshop, by selecting Edit, then Purge, then All from Photoshop's The first thing you need to do is to quit Photoshop if it’s open. Then, open the Finder and go to the Applications folder. From here, locate and open the Utilities folder. Inside the Utilities folder, you will find the Activity Monitor application. Launch Activity Monitor and select the Memory tab at the top of the window. If the C: drive is designated as your scratch disk, that is your main HD. There isnt a location on your HD where the scratch disk is located - it IS your C: drive entirely. The issue is as you use PS, it builds up space usage until you quit. I would follow Michelle's recommended link and also designate a different drive than the same as your The scratch file is a temporary file in the root folder of whatever disk you set in Preferences. It is created when Photoshop opens and is deleted on closure. It starts at around 5GB and can grow in use to many GB, so it advisable to have at least 100GB free on the disk you choose for scratch. Dave. . Therefore, the problem can be solved by changing the scratch disk location. Step 1: Run Photoshop, find the (Edit)- (Preferences)- (Scratch Disk) option in the top function bar. Step 2: Uncheck the system disk C:, and then check the drive with more free space (such as D: or F:) except the system disk. If you really want to clear house, download WinDirStat (free): You can disable hibernation in Windows, that's the big red blobs gone. You should also move the Bridge cache to D. Depending on how big your archive is, that can be several 10s of GB right there. And then you can possibly also look at moving system TEMP. 2 Replies. Jump to latest reply. Community Expert , Try using the icon you use to start Photoshop and immediately press an hold Ctrl+Alt or on a Mac CMD+Option You should then get a dialog that will allow you to configure Photoshop scratch disks. JJMack. Option 1: Clear Photoshop cache. If you want to empty the scratch disk in Photoshop, a good place to start is to empty your photoshop cache. While Photoshop automatically deletes the cache when you exit the program, some items can be missed. Here’s how to thoroughly clear the Photoshop cache: Open Photoshop. and also most of the photoshop install files will still install on C drive even if you specify a different drive, but it's not the drive that photoshop is installed on but what the Scratch Disk preference is set to. If your able to get photoshop fully open go to Edit>Preferences>Scratch Disks and change the Scratch Disk to the drive of choice.

how to change scratch disk in photoshop