How to Handle Big Design Asset Libraries on Mac

A working designer’s Mac is a different animal. The Downloads folder has 4,000 PNGs from various stock sites. The Documents folder has PSDs going back to 2019. The font menu takes 12 seconds to open. There are six versions of final-final-v2-ACTUAL.ai scattered across the desktop.

This is a guide to making that manageable — without breaking your workflow.

Inventory first, then plan

Open ~/Library/ (Finder → Go → hold Option → Library) and run Get Info on these:

• Fonts/ — anything over 2GB means you’ve installed too many
• Application Support/Adobe/ — easily 30–50GB of caches and previews
• Application Support/Sketch/ — symbol caches, plugin data
• Caches/ — across all your design apps

Then in your home folder:

• Documents/ — PSDs, AIs, INDDs that should probably be archived
• Downloads/ — fresh assets that haven’t found a home
• Desktop/ — screenshots and exports

A typical working designer has 80–200GB of asset clutter without realizing it.

Fonts: the silent app slowdown

Most font-related performance issues come from having too many active fonts. macOS has to enumerate every installed font when an app launches a font menu. Five hundred active fonts: fine. Four thousand: the font menu in Illustrator becomes a multi-second freeze.

The fix: install fonts with a font manager (RightFont, Typeface, FontBase) that activates fonts only when needed. Most are free for basic use.

If you don’t want a font manager, at least audit Font Book. Applications → Font Book → All Fonts. Sort by name. Disable (don’t delete) anything you can’t remember using in the last year.

Hidden gotcha: some apps install fonts in their own bundle. Adobe Creative Cloud installs hundreds of Adobe Fonts you may have activated and forgotten. Open Creative Cloud → Fonts → Manage active fonts, and turn off the ones you don’t need active.

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Adobe’s hidden disk hog

Creative Cloud apps aggressively cache. The folders that grow without bound:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files/ — Premiere/After Effects
• ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop 2026/Adobe Photoshop 2026 Settings/ — preview caches
• ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Bridge 2026/Cache/ — full-resolution previews of every folder you’ve browsed
• ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/ — general caches

Bridge is the worst offender. It generates thumbnails and previews for every folder you open and never deletes them. If you’ve used Bridge for a while, this folder is often 20–40GB.

To reset: quit all Adobe apps, delete the contents of those folders, relaunch. Bridge will rebuild thumbnails as you browse, but only for what you actually use.

In Photoshop preferences, set Performance → Scratch Disks to an external SSD if you have one. Photoshop’s scratch disk can balloon to 100GB during heavy work and only frees space when you quit the app.

Organizing the asset library

There’s no perfect system, but the one that survives contact with reality looks like:

~/Assets/
  fonts/
    purchased/
    free/
    client-licensed/
  stock/
    photos/
    illustrations/
    icons/
    textures/
  brand/
    [client]/
      logos/
      guidelines/
      typography/
  templates/
  references/

The split between purchased and client-licensed matters at tax time and when licenses get audited.

Two rules that keep the system working:

1. Stock assets get filed by source folder, not by project. A texture used on three projects shouldn’t have three copies. Reference it from each project.
2. Project files reference the asset library, not copies of it. Place-link in InDesign, smart objects in Photoshop, linked images in Figma.

Project archive vs working files

Designers rarely delete old project files because clients come back asking for revisions years later. The compromise: archive aggressively, delete almost nothing.

For each finished project, make an archive folder with:

• The final native files (PSD, AI, INDD, FIG export, Sketch)
• Final exports (PDFs, PNGs, etc.)
• A short text file noting what fonts and stock assets were used
• The brief, contract, or proposal

Skip:

• Photoshop history snapshots
• “Old versions” folders
• Smart object linked files (if they’re in your asset library)
• Render outputs from After Effects
• Bridge cache, Sketch caches, anything in ~/Library/Caches/

A typical 6-month project drops from 40GB to 4GB this way. Move archives to external storage; keep the working folder on internal SSD.

Figma, Sketch, and the cloud problem

Cloud-first design tools have a different cleanup pattern. The files aren’t really on your Mac, but the caches and exports are.

Figma: the desktop app caches recent file thumbnails and offline copies. ~/Library/Application Support/Figma/ can hit 5–10GB. Quit Figma, delete the cache folder, relaunch. Anything you actually need re-downloads.

Sketch: ~/Library/Application Support/com.bohemiancoding.sketch3/ holds plugin caches and version history. The Versions folder can grow large if you’ve worked on big files for a while.

Linear, Notion, Pitch: all cache locally. None are huge individually but they add up to 5–10GB across half a dozen apps.

Exports are the bigger issue. Designers export PNGs and PDFs constantly while iterating. The Downloads folder accumulates 10,000 files over a year. Filter by Kind: Image, sort by Date Modified, and triage anything older than 90 days. Most of it is throwaway.

Stock and reference photos

Stock photo libraries grow without bound. Some habits that help:

• Download to a single staging folder (~/Downloads/stock-incoming/), not directly to assets
• Once a week, file or delete everything in the staging folder
• Tag with Finder tags (color-coded) for “client work,” “personal,” “experiments”
• Use Spotlight comments to add searchable keywords

If you use Eagle, Inboard, or Mylio Photos for organizing references, those apps maintain their own libraries on disk. They’re worth the disk space if you actually use them. If you’ve stopped opening the app, the library is just dead weight.

Cleaning up without breaking links

The biggest fear when cleaning a designer’s Mac is breaking placed links in InDesign or smart objects in Photoshop. A safe workflow:

1. Don’t move or delete anything from the active asset library while a project is open
2. Use File → Package in InDesign to gather all linked assets into a self-contained folder before deleting source files
3. In Illustrator, use File → Save As with Embed Linked Files before deleting linked sources
4. Photoshop smart objects break if the source file moves; embed before cleanup

The Documents/Adobe/ folder Adobe creates and the Creative Cloud Files/ folder are two places where files quietly accumulate. Both can be cleaned, but check what’s in them first — Lightroom catalogs sometimes live in Documents/Lightroom/.

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A monthly routine

Twenty minutes on the first of the month:

1. Empty Adobe Bridge cache (it’ll rebuild)
2. Clear Premiere/After Effects media cache
3. Triage Downloads folder
4. Move finished project archives to external drive
5. Delete obvious throwaway exports from Desktop
6. Run a cleanup scan to catch the rest

That’s it. The compounding effect over a year is huge — a designer’s Mac running on the same routine is consistently 100–200GB lighter than one running without.

What about NAS or shared drives?

For teams of 2+ designers, a NAS (Synology, QNAP) running over 10GbE makes a lot of sense. Active projects on local SSD; everything else on the NAS. The catch is that 1GbE is too slow for editing PSDs over the network — invest in 2.5GbE or 10GbE on the Mac side and a switch that supports it. The total cost (NAS + drives + switch + cabling) is around $1,500–$3,000 but pays back fast if it stops you buying bigger laptops every two years.