[newbie] Gimp - Why Such A Hard Disk Hog?

[Sevatio Octavio]

Gimp keeps using up my home partition when I use it to manipulate graphics files.  
I've already allocated 1.5Gigs and Gimp manages
to fill that very quickly.  I'm only messing with small graphics files.  What can I do 
to alleviate this problem?

Seve