Adobe—stop taking up all my hard drive space …

I recently discovered hundreds of GBs on my machine of Adobe cruft. I’m a very light Adobe After Effects user for some work-related content (I probably open the app 4 times a month), so I was shocked to find it had cached anything within a 10-mile radius :slight_smile:

I did figure out you can:

  • limit the amount of space Adobe apps are allowed to use for caching purposes
  • delete cache files from several places

Wrote it up quickly here:

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How did you discover these large cache files? I use Adobe products regularly and I just scanned with Daisy Disk and didn’t find huge cache files anywhere. Also, my installation doesn’t look anything like what you described in your writeup.

I’m using Adobe Creative Cloud (most recent versions of all apps) on an M1 on Monterey. I did have to install the M1 versions a few weeks ago, but since then I’ve used Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, so I’d expect to have big cache files by now! I found about 8 GB, which is reasonable.

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I think the video apps are the major cache hogs. I only use Photoshop and Lightroom and only have 3.5MB in ApplicationSupport/Adobe/Common.

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Thanks for the comment! I think I found mine with the native macOS storage management tool in the “About My Mac” section?

It was really odd. I don’t know if I’m alone, but once I discovered it and capped my allowed cache, it’s stayed small. Hopefully no one else has this problem!

That’s good to know! I use Affinity products for light photo editing, design, and layout, so I don’t know how Photoshop and Lightroom work with caching. Glad to hear it’s not taking up everyone’s space! :slight_smile:

Got it! Thanks for clarifying.

And @tomalmy , I think you’re right – video (and to some extent) audio editing apps use really big caches. (Though to be fair, I remember managing the Photoshop cache back when it was somewhere around version 3.)

I’m not seeing anything unexpected in System Information > Storage > Manage, except for “iOS Files” which seem to insist on keeping iOS backups around. I should probably either update those backups or delete them, since they add up to 170 GB!

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Wow! 170GB!! That’s impressive!