Scratch Disks are Full"? The Final Solution in Photoshop! (2021)

 So let's say you're working on a huge image and as soon as you apply this particular filter, this error shows up and it continues to show up every time you try to do something from now on in Photoshop. Why does that happen?

In simple words, it just means that there isn't enough space for Photoshop to work. That's it. In this article, 

we're going to learn three things we can do to completely wipe it off. So without any further ado, let's get started.

Welcome to the magical world of Photoshop. And let's say this is the image that we are working on. And we suddenly get that error. What should we do?

 

Let's start with the obvious.

Number one - 

Clean your drive. That's it. As simple as that.

Now the question is which drive to clean?

Find out the drive that has been assigned as a Scratch Disk for Photoshop. By default, it will be the drive with your operating system. 

But if you still want to find out, here's how to do it. On Windows, go to Edit and then Preferences. On a Mac, that would be Photoshop and then Preferences.

Now inside Preferences down here, you need to choose Scratch Disks. So for me, by default, it has set C Drive as Scratch Disk, which also has my operating system. 

So figure out which drive has been assigned as a Scratch Disk and just remove unnecessary files or remove the files that you do not use and keep them in an external storage device.

The ones that I use are these, just give me a second. These are 4 Terabyte external hard drives. So you can use one of these or if you want super-speed drives, you can also use an external SSD. Your choice is how much you want to spend.

That's totally upon you. Just use any external storage device. Keep the drive clean. If you're on Windows, you can also run this called Disk Cleanup. You can just run this and just remove temporary files.

So we're going to choose the drive and hit OK and it's going to show a list of files that are probably not required, maybe thumbnail information, and so on and so forth. We're going to check most of them.

Recycle Bin and all of that, and as you can see, 1.73 GB is what we can remove and clean up. 

If you're doing it for the first time, it will be much more than this for you. Also, if you're a video editor, you might as well consider cleaning up the Cache files. So especially in Premier, there's something called Media Cache.

Sometimes it takes up to 20 Gigabits. So, remove all of that and the first thing is done. Now the second thing you can do is Purge. 

Let me show you what that is. So let's say, let's add a Curves Adjustment layer, let's apply something to this by going to Select, and then we're going to go to Color Range and let's select the Greens and you can read about the Color Range articles on Google.

Doesn't matter, Hit OK. I made a selection and then I create a Curves Adjustment layer and maybe I want to add some shine to it. So with the help of my hand, I brighten this particular area, just adding a little shine and darkening this area.

This is interesting. Here's the before, and here's the after. And then let's add some text. So I type in HelloWorld.It is not important what I'm doing right now. 

We're going to choose the font. One of my favorite fonts here is Gilroy ExtraBold.And for this one, we're going to choose Gilroy Light.

So, let's make it a little bigger, something like this, and place it in the center.Right.So this is interesting. This is what we did, we have done a lot of steps on this one. 

Now if you open up the History, you'll see a lot of steps in there. So if you go to Window, then make sure History is checked. So let's go down to History. 

There you go or you can click this button. So these are the steps that we did.

These history states can take considerable space, especially when you're working with large images with hundreds of layers.

 Let's say, you're creating a Composite. Sometimes they can take up the gigabits, a lot, double-digit gigabit space.

So, we can clean this up very easily by going to Edit and then Purge. Now, inside of that, we have a couple of options. So let's figure out what these options are. 

The first one is Undo. If you click on that, it will just clear the Undo which means the last step, So let's click on Undo. Hit OK.

These cannot be undone. Just keep that in mind. Hit OK. Now, you see nothing here happening, but if you press Ctrl + Alt + Z in the latest version of Photoshop or Photoshop 2018 and before if you press Ctrl + Z, nothing will happen. You cannot Undo, even if you go to Edit.

Have a look, Undo is now greyed out. Now the second one, what is the second one? Let's go to Purge. The second one is Clipboard. Now Clipboard is a little different. 

Let's say you had copied this image. So we're going to go to the background. We're going to press Ctrl or Command + A. We have copied this by pressing Ctrl or Command + C. So where does it copy? it copies in the background in something called a Clipboard. 

So it is copied to the clipboard. Now, the next time you open any other image or document, so let's say we go to File - New and we create a new document like, let's go for A4, we're going to create that and we paste it, we are pasting it from the Clipboard.

So, when we press Ctrl or Command + C, it saves it to the Clipboard, and from there, we paste it right there. Now, if we clear the Clipboard, if we keep pressing Ctrl or Command + V, see it's creating new layers.

It just keeps on adding them. Let me delete that. Now if I clear the Clipboard by going to Edit - Purge and then Clipboard, hit OK, that is now deleted. Even if I press Ctrl or Command + V, nothing is going to paste right there.

The clipboard can also take up a considerable amount of space, especially let's say, you have taken a picture, let's say, a panorama or something of that sort or a picture with a 50-megapixel camera or a 150-megapixel Phase One camera - Medium Format, and you have pressed Ctrl or Command + C on the high bit depth image, it takes a ton of space in your Clipboard.

So you can clear that up by choosing Clipboard, or what I do is Purge, I choose all. History is self-explanatory. If you choose History, hit OK, all of the History is now deleted.

If you go to Edit - Purge - All, all of these three will be deleted. Now, of course, we have done them one by one, so All is greyed out. So let me do some steps, let me create a couple of new layers, and let me just copy this, copy the selection. Now we have a Clipboard.

If we go to Edit - Purge, now we have an Undo, we have a Clipboard, and we have a History. If you choose all, hit OK. Everything is deleted.

 It clears some of the space. So, the second thing you can do is Purge. The third and final thing that we can do is simply add additional drives.

Take an additional external hard drive. I would highly recommend SSD for super-fast performance. 

So if you have an SSD or external SSD connected to your system, and then you can add it simply by going to Edit - Preferences, if you're using a Mac, that would be Photoshop and then Preferences.

Inside Preferences, we will go to Scratch Disk. I already have one connected and one extra drive on my computer. I can just simply check it, check it. 

So it's going to use all of these three drives as Scratch Disk. It's amazing, it has a ton of space to work on and hit OK.

Now you have simply more space to sum it up. There are just two things we can do to solve this issue. Number one, clear more space. And number two, create more space. That's it.

And just to remind you for faster performance, if you don't have enough space on your system, you can connect an SSD, or external SSD and use that as a Scratch Disk.

So that's pretty much it for this article. I hope this article helped you and if it did, make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to share and not just like, comment so that you, my friend, don't miss any other future tips, tricks, and more articles. Thanks so much for reading this article.

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