300,000×300,000 pixel Photoshop files

Those are, apparently, the dimensions a PSB file maxes out at. Out of curiosity, I tried creating a new document at those dimensions and despite having 36.91GB of free space I got the following warning:

OS X's “Your startup disk is almost full” warning dialog

@JonJungemann tried with 900GB of free space and got the same warning.

If anyone out there has more than 900GB worth of scratch disk space available, I’d love to know 1 how much is needed to create a file at those dimensions.


Update: @ckenney108 set a Drobo with 16.75TB of free space as a scratch disk and managed to create the file. It takes up 360GB of scratch space and 4.22GB on disk. I’m not sure why 900GB wasn’t sufficient to create it.

The Get Info pane of the PSB file

  • My email address is elliot [underscore] jackson [at] me [dot] com. ↩