My photos are on an external hard drive, but when I use dxo Photlab on my Mac, my hard drive fills up at high speed to reveal the images. Is it normal for DXO to use the hard drive of the computer to view the images ?
My problem is that I have no more space on my hard drive and I find myself stuck.
I don’t understand why DXO doesn’t use the external hard drive: do you have a solution?
Even though your images are on an external disk, PhotoLab uses your “system” drive for its database and cache, both of which help to speed up its operations.
What size internal drive do you have and how come it is so full? What else are you storing on it?
Happy New Year everyone and thanks a lot for your answer.
I use a macbook with 128gb when I travel. Is there any solution for DXo to use external hard drive storage?
And how much free space did you have before you installed PhotoLab?
Only 25gb and it’s not enough to work with DXO, while I can with Lightroom.
you can use extetnal drives for storage. however be aware that when connecting an external drive the drive letter might be different. i would ssy set both load and save options in the preferenced to dop files.
in windows.
george
No matter what software you use, having that little space on the disk is not recommended because the OS itself uses disk space when memory gets low.
macOS doesn’t use drive letters - that’s a peculiarity of Windows.
There is no solution except to continue with Lightroom ! 
Or to free up a reasonable amount of space on your disk. Fill it much more and you’re likely to run into other problems, like not having enough free space to perform upgrades.
That said, I can’t say I’ve noticed PL using an excessive amount of disk space unless it starts to swap, but that’s not specific to PL. If you see large files under /private/var/vm then that’s your problem.
I have a brand new MacBook Air M1 (16GB/1TB).
After setup and installing Affinity Photo and PhotoLab, only 48 GB are used.
According to what I see with my 2019 iMac, an easy way to circumvent the lack of drive space is to attach an external SSD of ample size, clone the boot drive to the external SSD and boot from it. Performance feels almost as good as with the internal drive.
I use Samsung T5 drives, any other brand and model should do too.
You might want to get a small/light drive and tape it to your computer 
Certainly so little free space can cause all sorts of problems elsewhere. The usual recommendation is to try and keep ⅓ of the drive free.
I just checked my PL4 cache folder and it only amounts to 127MB and the DxO PhotoLab v4 folder, where the database is stored only takes up 224MB.
I just checked mine and have only got 3 1GB files there.
I think it is unfair to blame PhotoLab for these problems. The app bundle is only just over 500MB, so with all this PhotoLab related files added together, you still only get less than 1GB of disk space.
@monserrat-l what else do you have installed or stored on your disk and are you saying that the disk only fills up when PhotoLab is running, then empties back down when it closes?
If all else fails, that is an excellent idea. Either that or simply move a load more stuff to the external drive.
Citation@monserrat-l what else do you have installed or stored on your disk and are you saying that the disk only fills up when PhotoLab is running, then empties back down when it closes?
Yes, that’s what happens! It’s very strange !
CitationAccording to what I see with my 2019 iMac, an easy way to circumvent the lack of drive space is to attach an external SSD of ample size, clone the boot drive to the external SSD and boot from it. Performance feels almost as good as with the internal drive.
This is good advice ! Thanks !
So, what else have you got installed or stored that is taking up so much space?
And how much memory do you have?
8go ram on my MacBook and 128go for my hard drive. I know, it’s not enough but with Lightroom, I’am be able to work properly.
You can easily find the big items with built-in tools:
When was the last time you emptied the trash?
So, I will ask yet again, what have you got installed or stored on your disk that is taking up all that space?
See @platypus reply for one way how to find out.
Have you tried an app like this? I had an issue with Windows (This app is for Mac) a while back and a similar app helped me track down the space hog very quickly. The visualisations help too.
Thanks a lot, I known how to manage but sometimes with iCloud, you find items that should be in the cloud and not in your documents.
Thanks Stephen, but I use cleaner one pro. But when you have little space on your hard drive, the life is difficult especially with DXO and its catalog management which is not at the level of Lightroom.
