Background task scheduler for Adobe creative apps

A designer has Photoshop open for a six-hour session. Around hour three, brush strokes start lagging, undo takes two seconds, and everything slows down. They know the fix is to restart — but they lose their history, their open documents, and their mental state. The complaint 'it gets very slow after using for a long time' and 'difficulties with performance especially if you work in the application for a long time' describes a well-known memory bloat pattern: scratch disk fills, undo history stacks up, temp files accumulate, and nothing cleans them up mid-session.

Adobe doesn't fix this because session memory management is deeply entangled with their undo architecture — cleaning it up mid-session risks corrupting history states, and that's a support nightmare Adobe doesn't want. So they don't do it, and users just restart.

The problem for long-session workers — video compositors, commercial retouchers, architects using Photoshop for mockups — is that a restart isn't just inconvenient. It wipes history, interrupts flow, and on slow machines can take five minutes to get back to working state. The complaint 'opening it often slows down my machine and sometimes freezes it' means even the restart cycle is painful.

This is a business because long-session professional use is exactly the workload that grows: commercial studios, post-production houses, and in-house creative teams run Photoshop for 8+ hour shifts. The need is daily. A tool that recovers an hour of sluggish performance across a team of five is worth hundreds of dollars a month in reclaimed output.

What to build

Build a macOS and Windows background process that monitors Photoshop and Lightroom Classic memory usage and scratch disk fill rate, and at configurable thresholds triggers safe cleanup routines (flushing non-essential caches, compacting scratch disk segments) without touching undo history — surfacing before/after memory stats in a menubar or tray indicator.

Where to start

Target macOS users specifically, where the interaction between Photoshop's scratch disk behavior and macOS memory compression is particularly poorly handled and well-documented in user complaints — this narrows the test matrix and gives you a credible first claim.

The hard part

The hardest technical problem is distinguishing scratch disk segments that are safe to flush from those tied to live undo states — getting this wrong even once causes data loss and destroys credibility with the exact professional buyer you need.

How it makes money

Per-seat annual license at $49/seat/year, with volume pricing for studios managing five or more workstations — IT managers at mid-size studios are the natural buyer since they're accountable for workstation performance.