Designer Workstation Cleanup: Cache Without Losing Presets

The line between cache and settings

Photoshop keeps your identity in two places: Preferences and Presets, both under %APPDATA%\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop [version]. Actions, brushes, swatches, custom workspaces, keyboard shortcuts — everything you spent years tuning lives there, and no cleanup should ever touch those folders. Caches are a different species: scratch disk space, Camera Raw data, Bridge and Lightroom previews are derived data, rebuilt from the originals the moment you open them. Deleting cache costs you time on first access; deleting presets costs you your setup.

• Camera Raw cache: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Adobe\CameraRaw — previews rebuilt on demand
• Bridge cache: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Adobe\Bridge — regenerates as you browse folders
• Lightroom previews: *.lrdata folders sit next to catalogs and rebuild
• Figma: Help → Troubleshooting → Clear Caches, or the folder under %APPDATA%\Figma
• Blender leftovers: the temp directory and whatever render output path you set

Adobe: the scratch disk is the real hog

The biggest Adobe waste is not cache but scratch: Photoshop claims free space on its scratch disk as a working area and holds onto it, and Bridge's central cache grows with every folder you have ever browsed — 50 GB Bridge caches are routine on busy machines. Lightroom's previews (*.lrdata) can dwarf the catalog itself; they are disposable, and Lightroom rebuilds them lazily as you scroll. Set the Camera Raw cache to a fixed cap in its preferences — the default is generous — and point scratch disks at a fast drive with headroom, separate from the one holding your originals.

Figma, Blender and the system layer

Figma's desktop app caches assets locally for speed and never cleans itself; the menu command resets it in seconds, and the next session refills only what you actually open. Blender does not accumulate much on its own — but its temp directory and your render output folder do, and an abandoned render sequence can hold half a terabyte. Below the applications sits the system layer: thumbnail caches and the DirectX shader cache grow with every GPU driver update. Kleaner PRO's cleanup covers that system layer and the common Adobe cache locations without touching presets folders — exactly the split this job requires.

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