The Cache is where the thumbnails and previews are stored for the main image files. Delete them and they’ll simply be recreated next time you navigate to the folder containing the main files.
As far as eating space is concerned, they take very little compared to the image files themselves.
Thanks, Is there someting else in Photoshop that eats disk space when processing the raw files?
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by "Eats Space" What are you seeing? Where and what are you measuring?
And what "processing" is taking place at the time? Are you just adjusting them in ACR, saving them as TIFFs, or opening the files?
Chrisjbirchall:
It seems when I run CS2 I notice that the space on my c drive seems to dimish as I use the program. Recently I re installed my operating system and I allocated 20 gigs to the c drive I thought that would be enough because before that I had 15 gigs on the c drive and I would continually get a message in Photoshop that I was running out of disc space on the c drive when in Photoshop.
I am processing raw files which I save as jpegs. I am adjusting them in ACR and then opening them in Photoshop and then running some actions but flattening them and saving them as jpegs. The files are not very large and I do not save them to that drive.
I assume therefore you have your scratch disk set to Drive C:
Photoshop creates quite large scratch files – often five or six times larger than the image you are working on.
Ideally your scratch disk should be on a different physical drive to the system and one which has plenty (10GB – 20GB) of free, defragmented space available.
Your Windows paging file also needs up to 4GB of space to expand into as it works – not to mention all the other various TEMP files created by various applications as they run. In fact no hard drive should ever be allowed to become more than about 70% full otherwise defragging would be very slow or even impossible.
So, a little housekeeping is required methinks. 🙂