There are a few things you can do to fix this “scratch disks are full” error in Photoshop. This includes letting Photoshop use more RAM and deleting the temporary files to regain your memory space. If you’d prefer to watch a video, check out our YouTube channel where we made a short walk-through video showing some of the fixes mentioned below in our article.
Free-Up Memory Space On Your Computer
When the above error happens, the first thing to do is clear all the junk files from your computer. This’ll free-up your memory space that Photoshop can then use to store temporary files.
Check Your Storage On Windows
Check Your Storage On Mac
Delete Photoshop Temporary Files
Photoshop creates and stores temporary files on your storage. These files can be safely deleted after you’ve closed Photoshop. This helps you regain some of your memory space.
Change The Scratch Disk On Startup
If you have assigned multiple scratch disks to Photoshop, you can actually switch between them on Photoshop’s startup. This solution works great when Photoshop doesn’t open as a result of the “scratch disks are full” error.
Change The Scratch Disk Drive In Photoshop
By default, Photoshop only uses your operating system’s drive as the scratch disk. If you have multiple drives or partitions, you can get Photoshop to use them and avoid the “scratch disks are full” error.
Disable The Auto Recovery Feature In Photoshop
Photoshop automatically saves your files as you work on them but this increases the amount of memory it uses on your computer. If auto-recovery saving isn’t much use to you, you can disable it to save some space on your scratch disks.
Let Photoshop Use More RAM
One way to fix the scratch disk issues with Photoshop is to allow Photoshop to use more RAM. This’ll let it store more temporary files on the RAM space on your scratch disks.
Delete The Photoshop Cache Files
Each time you make a change to an image in Photoshop, an older unchanged version of your image is saved as a cache file on your computer. These files eventually grow and start taking too much of your memory space. You can clear these cache files to possibly fix the scratch disks error but at the cost of not being able to revert changes for your image.
Reset The Values For Crop Tool
The crop tool in Photoshop lets you crop your photos by your specified size. If you choose the wrong units while specifying the size, say choosing centimeters instead of pixels, you end-up making your image extremely large. That image occupies a large amount of memory space which causes the “scratch disks are full” error in Photoshop.
Defrag Your Hard Drive
It’s worth defragging your scratch disk drive in Windows to get some continuous memory space for Photoshop to use. This should help you get rid of the scratch disks error in the app.
Reset Photoshop Preferences
If you’ve made loads of changes to your Photoshop preferences, one or many of those tweaked options may be causing the issue. Resetting the Photoshop preferences to the defaults should fix this for you. How did you fix the “scratch disks are full” error in Photoshop? Let us and our readers know in the comments below.
