How to Clear Your Photoshop Scratch Disk for Better Performance?

Why Clear the Photoshop Scratch Disks?

Design applications like Photoshop typically require scratch disks as temporary storage when they run out of available RAM. These disks temporarily store data such as history states, clipboard content, and cache files. By default, Photoshop uses your system drive (usually the C: drive on Windows) as the scratch disk.

Over time, this data can accumulate and fill up your scratch disk, leading to several performance issues, including:

• The “Photoshop scratch disk full” error
• Photoshop becoming slow or unresponsive
• Crashes or failure to open large files
• A full system drive, which can slow down your entire computer

Fortunately, there are several effective ways to avoid these issues. Read this post to learn how to clear your Photoshop scratch disk, restoring your system to peak performance.

How to Clear the Photoshop Scratch Disk?

Fix 1. Remove Temporary Files

Photoshop creates multiple temporary files as you work, which are stored on your scratch disk. These files can linger even after you close the program, taking up valuable space. You can remove these temporary files by following the steps:

Step 1: Close Photoshop completely.

Step 2: Navigate to the location where Photoshop stores its temporary files.

On Windows, it's usually: C:\Users\[YourUsername]\AppData\Local\Temp

Step 3: Look for files that start with "Photoshop Temp" followed by numbers.

Step 4: Delete all the unnecessary temp files, but avoid deleting other system-related temporary files unless you’re sure they’re safe to remove.

Step 5: Empty your system’s Recycle Bin to completely free up the space.

Fix 2. Clear Photoshop Cache

Photoshop saves a cache to help your projects load faster, especially when working with large images. This cache includes old versions of your files. Usually, Photoshop deletes the cache when you close the program. But sometimes it misses files—especially if the program crashes or you force it to close. Here’s how to manually clear the cache inside Photoshop:

Step 1: Launch Photoshop, open the Edit menu and click Purge.

Step 2: In the drop-down menu, select All to clear all caches, or choose an individual cache to clear (Clipboard, Histories, Video Cache).

Step 3: Restart Photoshop to ensure the clearing process is complete.

Fix 3. Delete Hidden Files

Besides temporary files, Photoshop can also leave hidden files or logs that slowly take up space on your scratch disk. You can follow these steps to clear your Photoshop scratch disk by removing them:

Step 1: Open File Explorer, click the “View“ tab, and check “Hidden items”.

Step 2: Search for hidden files with names like .tmp, .dat, or logs that relate to Photoshop activity.

Step 3: Carefully delete the files you don’t need anymore.

Step 4: Empty the Recycle Bin to completely free up the space.

Bonus Tip: Allocate Free Space to the Scratch Disk

If you're running into the "scratch disks are full" error in Photoshop, one effective solution is to add more free space to the drive being used as the scratch disk. While Windows does let you extend a partition with unallocated space, this option isn’t available if there's no adjacent unallocated space.

That’s where AOMEI Partition Assistant comes in. This powerful partition manager allows you to directly allocate free space from one partition to another on both Windows PCs and Servers. With just a few clicks, you can expand the disk space available to Photoshop’s scratch disk.

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Let’s use AOMEI Partition Assistant to allocate free space to the Photoshop scratch disks:

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. Then right-click the partition you want to allocate space from and choose "Allocate Free Space".

Step 2. In the new window, specify how much space to allocate and select the target partition (usually C: drive). Then click "OK."

By default, Photoshop uses the C: drive as the scratch disk. In this example, we’re reallocating space from the D: drive to the C: drive.

Step 3. Finally, click "Apply" to start the reallocating process.

In addition to the “Allocate Free Space” feature, AOMEI Partition Assistant offers a variety of advanced tools, including moving installed programs to another drive, deleting large files, upgrading an old drive to a larger one, and more. Whether you're optimizing your disk for Photoshop or managing overall system storage, this software provides a reliable solution.

Bottom Lines

Photoshop is a powerful and widely-used image editing software. However, some users may encounter the "Photoshop scratch disk is full" error while using it. Don’t worry! This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to clear your Photoshop scratch disk. Additionally, you can also reallocate free space to the drive where the scratch disk is located—helping you optimize Photoshop’s performance and avoid workflow disruptions.