My ~/Library/Caches folder on my mac is huge (55GB!) and most of it is attributed to the Adobe Camera Raw folder.
I want to check to make sure it is ok to clear this (put in Trash) before I do so. I don't want to go messing up my whole Lightroom photo catalog somehow.
Has anyone done this before? Any problems?
I agree with Alaska Man that things may depend on settings and, as a general rule, you'd better know what you are doing.
That said, I regularly delete this folder (on Windows) without ill effects. (I also set a fairly low cache limit). Once I process my RAWs, I rarely return to them, so there is little point keeping the cached copies.
If you are not sure, just rename the folder and see if everything still works in ACR, esp. when editing RAWs you recently processed already. (I prefer this explicit way instead of using Trash). Then, after a while, you can delete this folder permanently.
IMO, if the software calls something 'cache', it must be purely performance-related and should be safe to delete at any time when the software isn't running. Alas, this is not always true in practice, but if so, the software is poorly designed. Fortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case with ACR.
It depends on how you have set the preferences in your particular system.
We do not know how you have set the preference for what is stored in that folder.
Is it all the metadata for all your raw files?
I do not know enough about what the default settings would be to advise you. But i do know enough to not delete things until i understand them. (learned the hard way)
If you do not know enough about how your system is set up then you should not go deleting things until you learn how and why it set up the way it is.
EDIT: I checked my Adobe Camera Raw Cache folder and it's size is 1.07 GB, all files have a .dat file extension.
A web search lead me to the following discussion.
What are ACR cached .dat files? Delete them?.
As others have said you CAN delete them BUT if you do when you go to a folder in Bridge that has RAW images in it Bridge/ARC will just recreate them. Those files are created so Bridge can display RAW camera files. Deleting them will save you some space on your drive BUT it will also cost you some time for Bridge/ARC to recreate them when you go back to look at these images.
Personally I have my Bridge/ARC cache set to 4 GB. Of course I have tons of unused space on my hard drives.
According to the website below (and my own experience), it's ok to delete the items in ~/Library/Caches/Adobe Camera Raw 2/*
Hope this helps!
https://asktimgrey.com/2019/04/03/deleting-cache-files/
Cheers,
-joe
