Best Way to Clear All Adobe Creative Cloud Caches at Once on Mac (2026)

If you have ever opened Disk Utility and wondered where your storage went, Adobe Creative Cloud is likely a major culprit. The suite of apps — Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, and the CC Desktop app itself — each maintains its own cache directories on your Mac. Knowing how to clear all Adobe cache on Mac in a single pass, rather than hunting through each app's preferences one by one, can reclaim anywhere from 5 GB to 40 GB or more on a well-used system. This guide covers every cache location, what each folder actually stores, what is safe to delete, and the fastest ways to do it in 2026 on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs running macOS Sequoia or Tahoe.

Why Adobe Caches Grow So Large

Adobe apps are built around non-destructive, RAM-hungry workflows. When Premiere Pro renders previews, Photoshop stores scratch data, or After Effects caches frame composites, those files land on disk rather than in memory. This is intentional — it makes re-opening a project dramatically faster. The problem is that Adobe apps rarely clean up after themselves automatically. A project you finished in 2024 can still have gigabytes of render cache sitting on your SSD in 2026.

The CC Desktop application also maintains its own download and update cache, which holds copies of installer packages long after you have already installed the apps. That cache alone can reach 10 GB on systems that have been updated through several major Creative Cloud releases.

Where Every Adobe Cache Lives on Mac

All cache paths below are relative to your home directory (~), which expands to /Users/yourname. Paths under ~/Library/ are hidden by default; press Shift + Command + G in Finder and paste any path to navigate there directly.

Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder all share the same media cache folder by default. Clearing it once clears all three.

What Happens When You Delete Adobe Caches

Nothing permanent is stored in these cache folders. Your actual project files, assets, presets, and preferences live in separate locations. Deleting caches means:

• Premiere Pro will re-conform audio and regenerate waveforms on the next project open — this can take a few minutes for long timelines.
• After Effects will rebuild its RAM and disk cache the first time you RAM-preview a composition.
• Lightroom Classic will regenerate Smart Previews and Standard Previews on demand — browsing will feel slower until the library is re-cached.
• Photoshop will rebuild its font cache on next launch (you may see a brief "loading fonts" delay).

None of this touches your Creative Cloud assets, Libraries, synced fonts, or stock licenses. Those live in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync and should not be removed.

How to Clear All Adobe Caches at Once — Step by Step

The safest approach is to quit all Adobe apps first, then delete the cache folders. Deleting them while an app is running can cause the app to immediately recreate the files, or in rare cases crash mid-session.

1. Quit every Adobe application: Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, and the CC Desktop app.
2. Open Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/).
3. Run the following command to remove all top-level Adobe cache directories in one pass:
   rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Adobe ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Common/Media\ Cache ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Common/Media\ Cache\ Files ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/AAMUpdater
4. Relaunch the CC Desktop app first to let it rebuild its index, then open your Adobe apps normally.

Note: On Apple Silicon Macs, Adobe apps run natively for Creative Cloud 2024 and later releases. The cache paths are identical to Intel — only the app binaries differ. If you are on an older version running under Rosetta 2, the same paths apply.

Clearing the Premiere Pro Media Cache Through the App

If you prefer a GUI method for Premiere's shared media cache (which is also the safest way to surgically remove only orphaned entries), Premiere offers a built-in cleaner:

1. Open Premiere Pro and go to Premiere Pro > Preferences > Media Cache.
2. Click Delete next to "Remove Media Cache Files."
3. Choose "Delete all media cache files from the system" to clear everything, or "Delete unused media cache files" to keep cache for currently open projects.

Clearing the After Effects Disk Cache Through the App

1. Open After Effects and go to After Effects > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache.
2. Click Empty Disk Cache.
3. Click Purge All Memory & Disk Cache from the Edit menu for an immediate in-session RAM purge.

Automating Cache Cleanup with a Shell Script

If you clear Adobe caches regularly — for example, before a Time Machine backup or at the end of a heavy editing week — a small shell script saves time. Create a file at ~/cleanup-adobe.sh with this content:

#!/bin/zsh
rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Adobe
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Common/Media\ Cache
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Common/Media\ Cache\ Files
echo "Adobe caches cleared."

Make it executable with chmod +x ~/cleanup-adobe.sh, then run it any time with ~/cleanup-adobe.sh from Terminal. You can also add it to macOS Automator or a cron job via crontab -e if you want hands-free monthly cleanup.

Other Adobe Storage You Might Want to Audit

Beyond caches, several other Adobe directories can accumulate significant storage over time:

• Render output folders — Premiere and After Effects write renders wherever you pointed them in project settings. Check your ~/Movies or project folders for stale exports.
• Crash logs and diagnostics — ~/Library/Logs/Adobe rarely exceeds 100 MB but is entirely safe to clear.
• Archived versions — Older Creative Suite (CS6 and earlier) left folders in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/ that you can safely remove if you no longer use those versions.
• TypeKit / Fonts — Synced fonts live in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype. Do not delete this if you have active font syncing; clearing it forces a full re-sync from the CC servers.

If you want a broader view of what is consuming space across your entire Mac — including Adobe folders, developer caches, node_modules, and system junk — a tool like Crumb can audit all of these at once and show what is safe before you delete.

For a wider look at what is eating your disk, see what is taking up space on my Mac and what cache files on a Mac actually are before you start deleting.

How Much Space Should You Expect to Recover?

Results vary widely based on how heavily you use Creative Cloud and how long it has been since the last cleanup. Light users who primarily use Illustrator and InDesign might recover 1–3 GB. Video editors who work with 4K or 6K footage in Premiere and After Effects can easily reclaim 30–60 GB, especially if the media cache has never been cleared. The CC Desktop installer cache is commonly 5–10 GB on a machine that has been through two or three major CC annual releases.

On a typical 512 GB MacBook Pro used for video production, clearing Adobe caches once a quarter is a reasonable maintenance habit. On a Mac Studio used as a dedicated editing workstation with a large internal SSD, you may choose to let caches grow larger and purge them only before major backups.