frank bruce Loc: Albuquerque,N.M

if i have my external drive plugged into the mac,i seem to have a problem with photoshop always getting confused when i search for an image. when i don't want to search where it trys to take me. is that too confusing?

Doddy Loc: Barnard Castle-England

For me...Yes Frank.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

I think you need to explain a bit more. As much detail as possible.

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

Most operating systems assume 'pictures' are in a particular folder on the hard drive, but if you are keeping your photos somewhere other than the default 'picture' folder, you have to tell it where you're keeping them by navigating to the folder and selecting the photo you want to bring in to PS.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Where does Photoshop point to the scratch drive? Internal? External? Are you looking for images that used to be on one drive or the other, but you "moved" them?

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Photoshop's assigned scratch drive has nothing to do with the drive being used to archive images. In fact, you don't want them to be the same drive.

Scratch drive is some assigned space that's set aside for PS to use when working on images, where it can store temporary files, previous/history versions, auto saves, etc. These are overwritten and purged periodically. Ideally this should be a reasonably fast internal drive, for best PS performance.

The image archive drive might be internal or external, may be a slower drive (for "cold" or long term, infrequently accessed storage) or a moderately fast, enterprise drive (for "hot" storage, such as all the shots from a recent shoot that you're currently working with a lot).

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If all is well with the system, that is all true. I like SSD drives for use as scratch space. However, hard drives of any type — especially externals — can and do become corrupt.

Files can become cross-linked, and I HAVE SEEN instances where the presence or sudden absence of a scratch drive and/or a corrupted removable external drive used for image storage affected the location — or ability — of Photoshop to save actual files.

When the scratch drive was removed, we found that Photoshop reverted back to the system drive. When the image storage drive was removed (and corrupted), Photoshop would hang, or save to the root... every time.

Using removable drives for image storage is fine, so long as you don't remove them without gracefully un-mounting them. Using them as scratch drives is fine, so long as they're always mounted when Photoshop is active and looking for them.

At the lab where I worked, one of our Photoshop workstations used for retouching had an external 1TB scratch drive. The FireWire cable got yanked out when the operator moved a box next to her computer. She plugged it back in... and didn't tell anyone until we had wasted a day trying to sort out the issues.

We had all sorts of problems with that system until we completely reformatted and RENAMED the drive, and, of course, "told" Photoshop the new drive name. I ordered an internal scratch drive for that computer right away.

frank bruce Loc: Albuquerque,N.M

yes! they used to be on my computer...same 1.

frank bruce Loc: Albuquerque,N.M

burkphoto, thank you, you certainly have good information. I have been having all the symtoms your speakin of. I'll follw up with you later but, i thank you !
frank

frank bruce Loc: Albuquerque,N.M

brucewells, that makes absolute good sense to me. I'll follow up with you a bit later.thank you very much.
frank bruce

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

Photoshop (and most other editors) can be configured to the location of the default image folder. The setup procedure can be found in the software's help menu. (Control the software, don't let the software control you!) Also, the operating system can be configured as to which folder is the image download default folder.