Affinity Photo Eats up All Disk Space

[Daniel the Schenz]

Hello!

I have recently started to use A.Photo and noticed that the app will completely occupy my whole hard drive (before opening A.Photo: 55GB free and available) when editing even a relatively small file (100MB) with the app.

At the moment, I am facing the problem that I can't save the currently open file because I only have 1.5MB left. I cannot even save the file to an external drive because that, too, seems to require some space on my hard drive first, which is unavailable.

So how do I save my progress, and how do I keep A.Photo from cluttering my whole drive while in use?

I hope you can help, any replies are appreciated! (Please don't make me do things that need more than 1.5MB of hard drive space…!)

Best,

Daniel

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Daniel the Schenz.

What OS are you using?

How many disk drives do you have, and what sizes?

[Daniel the Schenz]

Hi!

I'm on macOS Big Sur (newest version) and I have one 120 GB system drive (55GB available) and a 4TB external drive (3.6TB available).

Thanks!

Daniel

[Daniel the Schenz]

Update: I bit the bullet, scrapped my work and re-launched the app. Now I'm back at the full 55GB of available disk space.

In Photoshop I can assign a scratch disk. I read that this option is not available on A.Photo because 'it seems to be a much more memory efficient app than Photoshop'. Well, it seems it isn't, actually. So how can I do something similar to assigning a scratch disk or else prevent A.Photo from killing my Mac?

Best,

Daniel

Edited January 7, 2021 by Daniel the Schenz

[v_kyr]

See also another thread with similar run out of space problems, though on Win system there.

[Daniel the Schenz]

Thanks, @v_kyr!

I have asked that question over there, too, but do you have any idea how I can 

Quote

link (physically move) the working directory of the file to another drive with more storage space and just keep a reference on the initial C:\ drive

on a Mac?

[v_kyr]

On MacOS aka Unix systems you create symbolic links (symlink) either via the "ln -s" or "link" command line program via Terminal.app or with the help of some Finder extension or script. Search on Google after topics like "MacOS create symbolic links" etc. - Also look on the net if something specific/important has maybe changed for Big Sur here, in terms of system path access rights and the like.

• How to Create and Use Symbolic Links (aka Symlinks) on a Mac
• How to create a symbolic link on your MacOS
• ln, link
• Creating root-level directories and symbolic links on macOS Catalina
• ... and so on ...

See further ..

• What Are Aliases, Symbolic Links, and Hard Links on a Mac?
• Wikipedia symbolic link (en)
• Wikipedia Alias (MacOS) (en)

[Daniel the Schenz]

Thank you, @v_kyr! I want to close this thread here because it is in fact a duplicate of this and everything is said over there!

DtS