Scratch disks, plug‑ins, and application updates

When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop Elements uses scratch disks. A scratch disk is any drive or partition of a drive with free memory. By default, Photoshop Elements uses the hard drive on which the operating system is installed as its primary scratch disk.

You can change the primary scratch disk, or designate additional scratch disks. When the primary disk is full, additional scratch disks are used. Set your fastest hard disk as your primary scratch disk. Ensure that the disk has plenty of defragmented space available.

For best performance, use the following guidelines when assigning scratch disks:

• Do no create scratch disks on the same physical drive as Photoshop Elements or any large files you are editing.

• Do not create scratch disks on the same physical drive as the one used for the operating system’s virtual memory.

• Create scratch disks on a local drive, not a network location.

• Create scratch disks on conventional (non-removable) media.

• RAID disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.

• Defragment drives with scratch disks regularly. Or better yet, use an empty drive or a drive with plenty of unused space, to avoid fragmentation issues.

Change scratch disks

Photoshop Elements needs contiguous hard drive space to create a scratch disk. Frequently defragmenting your hard drive ensures that there is contiguous space available, especially the disk containing your scratch disk. Adobe recommends that you use a disk tool utility to defragment your hard drive on a regular basis. See your OS documentation for information on defragmentation utilities.

About plug‑in modules

Adobe Systems and other software developers create plug-ins to add functionality to Photoshop Elements. A number of importing, exporting, and special-effects plug‑ins come with your program; they are inside the Photoshop Elements plug‑ins and optional plug‑ins folders.

Once installed, plug‑in modules appear as:

• Options added to the Import or Export menu
• Filters added to the Filter menu, or,
• File formats in the Open and Save As dialog boxes.

If you install a large number of plug‑ins, Photoshop Elements may not be able to list them all in their appropriate menus. If so, newly installed plug‑ins appear in the Filter > Other submenu. To prevent a plug‑in or folder of plug‑ins from loading, add a tilde character (~) at the beginning of the plug‑in name, folder, or directory. The program ignores files marked with a tilde character, while starting. To view information about installed plug‑ins, choose Help > About Plug‑In and select a plug‑in from the submenu.

You can select an additional plug‑ins folder in which to load compatible plug‑ins stored with another application. You can also create a shortcut for a plug‑in stored in another folder on your system. You can then add the shortcut or alias to the plug‑ins folder to use that plug‑in with Photoshop Elements.

Install plug‑in modules

Select an additional plug‑ins folder

You can use an additional folder for third-party plug-ins. Here's how you can set up additional plug-ins:

Load default plug-ins only

When Photoshop Elements starts, all plug-ins that are pre-installed, third-party, or located in additional plugins-folders, are loaded. To load only the preinstalled plug-ins Photoshop Elements was shipped with, press and hold the Shift key while starting the software. When asked, click yes on the dialog that requests confirmation to skip loading optional and third-party plug-ins.