Ever get this message “The Scratch Disk is Full” when using Photoshop or Elements? Well, you will. And it will surprise you because it won’t let you do anymore work until you fix it.
(Hands being raised and waving frantically) “Okay, so what is it and how do I empty it?”
Good question. Here’s the story. Both Photoshop and Elements let you do lots of cool, neat things. On really big files. Often you do really cool, neat things on lots of files at the same time – like designing a new scrapbook layout. All of those files take up loads of memory in your computer – the temporary “I’m working on this file” kind known as RAM. And Photoshop likes to have about 5 times the size of all of the files you are working on available to work with.
No one has that much memory – do they? So enter the scratch disk. The scratch disk is a hard drive on your system where Photoshop and Elements temporarily stores bits and pieces of the file you are working on. It’s constantly swapping stuff in and out of memory and onto this hard drive and works quietly away in the background. To set up the location of the scratch disk, go to Edit – Preferences – Performance. For it to work most efficiently, it should not be your main hard drive – where the operating system is installed. It also can’t be an external hard drive. So for the best set up you need another internal drive. Well, most of us don’t have that – so the main hard drive is ok.
Now how does it get full? When ever Photoshop or Elements has a problem or crashes it puts huge, temporary work files out on the scratch disk. And these can clog up your system. To find them, search for “~PST####.tmp” on Windows and “Temp####” on a Mac and delete them (it is safe to delete them – they contain corrupt data and aren’t usable in any way).
Two other situations can cause the error too – the disk might need to be defragmented (see info about defragging a Windows disk and a defragging a Mac.) And the other is something I’ve done! If you try and crop an image, usually by mistake, to some ridiculous size, the system will try and create a massive temp file and run out of space. For example, I’ve went to crop something to 600 x 600 pixels, but mistakenly set it to 600 x 600 inches. Yikes! Photoshop will spit that back at you every time.
So who’s gotten this error before? And how big were those temp files? Leave us a comment.
Other posts you will enjoy:
- Quick Tip Tuesday – A Disappearing Act If you’ve been using Photoshop for a while, (I started with Version 2!) you might remember that your PSD files used to show up a thumbnails (you could see what the file look like without opening...
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- Quick Tip Tuesday – They Took Out What? While you have to hand it to Adobe for creating cutting-edge, industry standard tools like Photoshop CS4 and Elements 7, sometimes they mess stuff up. I know a lot of digiscrappers had their work flow altered...
- Update to Quick Tip Tuesday – A Disappearing Act Just wanted to pass along an update from my post on Tuesday 8/19/08. In our comments Bernice had asked if the trick to bring back the disappearing Photoshop thumbnails works in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3… It...
June 8, 2010
cynthia mcdonald
i get this ALL the time- i set up a search for those files to get them off my hard drive- thank you -cyn