temp files problem

[scotty]

I tried Image Magick a few weeks ago - I don't remember the exact circumstances - but it or any remnant (registry, etc) I can find are no longer on my machine (Win 7 64 bit). Problem is, now whenever I use 64 bit Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator (CS6), my temp folder (and therefore my entire C drive) immediately fill with "magick-XXXXXXXX" files, rendering my PC unusable. I have lost many hours of professional work struggling with this and tracking down what might be happening to no avail. Can you help? If you communicate with me, I could make a video of this occurring to demonstrate. This does not happen if I use 32 bit Photoshop and Illustrator that installed with the CS6 package, but of course I would love the use of my 64 bit programs back. This is very strange, and I don't know what to do. Thank you for considering the issue.

[snibgo]

whenever I use 64 bit Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator (CS6), my temp folder (and therefore my entire C drive) immediately fill with "magick-XXXXXXXX" files

I don't think Adobe products use ImageMagick, so I don't see how this can happen. Perhaps you have another process that fires up ImageMagick when image files are created or accessed.

Removing ImageMagick should stop "magick-XXXXXXXX" files from being created.

Perhaps you can put your video on YouTube or somewhere.

[scotty]

As I mentioned, there was no detectable remnant of ImageMagick on my system, and yet this is happening.
Update: I had stated that it was not happening in 32 bit versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, and this was the case until today. Was working on a large file in 32 bit Illustrator and the magick-XXXXXXXX files started piling up again, wasting an entire day hard rebooting and trying things. One thing I tried was reinstalling ImageMagick, then uninstalling it again. Didn't change anything, unfortunately.

Here's what I discovered: Not only does the C drive fill with dozens of 500Mb magick-XXXXXX files during use of Photoshop and Illustrator, but just opening the File/Open dialog onto a folder containing Photoshop and Illustrator files triggers it. And further, even opening a standard Windows explorer folder of these files triggers it, so this led me to think it is related to Windows thumbnails. I turned off thumbnails altogether in Control Panel, and so far I am able to at least open a file in 64 bit Illustrator. I'll work with it a bit and report back if this holds. I need to get work done. I'm a designer at a game company, this is my work computer, and deadlines are suffering.

The major conundrum here is how are magick-XXXXXXX files getting created when that app is completely uninstalled from my computer? Somehow the use of thumbnails on this PC cross-breeds with an unknown entity and creates those huge files.

I did make a video of the magick files filling the temp folder as I navigate an Illustrator File/Open, but it became pretty pointless to post it when I saw that it was also occurring in an explorer window with thumbnails, and I didn't get a chance to upload it to YouTube during the day.

Thanks for any and all consideration and help on the issue.
-Scott

[snibgo]

It is possible that you have installed some other software that contains ImageMagick. (Windows computers often come pre-installed with junk software.) You might review what software is installed. In Windows 8.1, this is Control Panel "Programs and features". If this includes software that you don't recognise, consider uninstalling it.

In Explorer, right-click an image will show programs associated with that file type. Again, if there is something weird, consider removing it.

Do a full search on all your drives for IM programs. "convert.exe" is also a Microsoft program, so should exist. You might search all drives for "mogrify.exe" or "identify.exe".

I'm not an expert at administration, but you might have a service running that hooks into image files. Control Panel, Administrative Services, Services might show up something.

Sorry, these are all wild guesses. IM itself is well-behaved, and shouldn't do as you describe. I suspect it has been incorporated into some other software but this is failing, causing temporary files to be created and not removed.

[snibgo]

Another trick you might try: create a new directory, say C:\imtmp . Set a system-wide environment variable MAGICK_TEMPORARY_PATH with the value "C:\imtmp". (See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/resou ... nvironment ) Do those temporary files get written to that directory? If they do, then you can set a quota. Sadly, Windows quotas seem to apply to devices, not directories. You might test this with a USB drive or something. Suppose this is drive H:. Then set the quota for this drive (Explorer, This PC, right-click the drive, properties, quota tab, then play with the settings.) Create a directory on that drive, and set MAGICK_TEMPORARY_PATH to it. Then, with luck, whatever is creating these files will run out of space without killing your machine.

Incidentally, if you discover the culprit or cure, please tell us!

[scotty]

Thanks for the great suggestions. WIll try them.
Worked all day today in 64 bit Photoshop and Illustrator with thumbnails turned off systemwide. No problems, snappy pc.
Used drive cleanup to delete the thumbnails cache, but for now leaving thumbnails off so I can get some work done.

Somehow thumbnails is triggering something to generate all those magick-XXXXXX files, so for now, no thumbnails and I'll use the Adobe bridge to browse graphics. Would love to be able to fix it permanently of course if I can ever get to the bottom of it.

I searched thumbnail issues today, and apparently thumbnails have been a pretty prevalent problem in Windows 7 for a lot of people. Related to thumbnails is the issue that I read somewhere that Adobe really wants people to use the bridge, and so disables viewing .PSD and .AI files in Windows explorer. I don't know if it's true, but there are .dlls from previous versions that can be added that supposedly fix this behavior such as aiicon.dll and psicon.dll.

None of this explains the interaction with the magick-XXXXXX files, but at least my system is working ok now.

Will continue to monitor and investigate as time allows.

-Scott

[fmw42]

Do you have Lightroom 2 and LR/mogrify plugin. The latter calls Imagemagick mogrify.

[scotty]

As best I can tell, I don't have Lightroom or mogrify plugin. It doesn't appear that they were included with Adobe CS6 or Adobe CS3 which are what I have installed on this PC. A search doesn't turn them up (in case I wasn't aware they might have been installed with a package). The search does turn up some help files and images from Dreamweaver, Acrobat and Flex which seem to relate to Lightroom, but nothing of the actual app.