How to clear temporary files in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Premiere writes a lot of temp files to various locations – the most obvious of those are saved at the same location as the current project, in a folder simply called Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files. If you delete an old project, make sure to delete this folder too.

But Premiere does create temporary files in another location too, it’s called the Media Cache Database. I’ve found as much as 50GB in it at one point.

I’m not entirely sure what Premiere is putting there, but it is nice enough to tell us where that cache database is located: head over to Preferences – Media to find out.

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There’s the location, and a convenient CLEAN button we should press regularly, especially because by default this location happens to be on the system drive. To avoid running out of space, feel free to use another drive for the cache database (via the browse option).

Thanks to Jan Ozer for this tip!



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10 thoughts on “How to clear temporary files in Adobe Premiere Pro”

  2. Pingback: Your disk is full because of Adobe Premiere Cache | Carpe Diem

  4. The beginning of this doesn’t properly tell you how to get rid of ALL preview files. Adobe also stores some on the local drive in Documents/Adobe. I’ve found up to 10GB of files dating back 3 years there whereas the preview files in the project location are kept rather trimmed.

    To PROPERLY delete render files, even when still working on a project, right click on a sequence and choose “Delete Render Files” or even just “Delete Work Area Render Files” if you only want to delete the selected work area preview files. This should delete all of the preview files in all of the various places it puts them, rather than deleting all preview files associated with an entire project and missing those it puts in other locations on the local drive.

    Reply

    • Thanks for the tip, Chad – I never knew that option existed. I usually delete a project when I’m done with it, including the preview files folder. But for archiving, I had always hoped there would be a way to purge those preview files to save some space. Thank you for sharing!

      Reply

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