Mac is storing full versions of resized photos with no apparent way to delete them

[bierce85]

Hey folks, I'm having an issue since upgrading to Catalina from Yosemite.

For work I take about 200 photos a day, 4 days a week on my iphone. When I get home I use image capture to download them into a folder. I then open them all in preview and resize to medium which takes the size down from about 500 MB to 20-30 MB. The problem is that the Mac stores all of the original files, even once the resized files have been deleted off the computer.

Over the course of 6 months or so you wind up with a full hard drive.

This is nothing new, but I found an article back in like 2016 that showed how to use terminal to show system files etc, etc and I could actually navigate into the "chunk storage" folders and manually delete them every few months. The problem is that method doesn't work any more in Catalina.

I dont know where you guys are at in terms of softwares but the idea of buying cleanmymac or mackeeper or whatever just out of the hopes that it can delete some files irks me. In general I tend to think of those softwares as unnecessary.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to find those files and manually delete them? Or, a cheaper software option more geared towards this sort of thing? I think I had daisydisk a while back but all it would do was point to the junk files, it wouldn't let me delete them.

Thanks!

 

[velocityg4]

Why not use an image editor that won't make revisions and get rid of the problem? Better ones will even let you setup batch jobs to automated the resize and save process. So, you can just point the batch job at all the photos for the day and go do something else.

Seems worth ten dollars a month for Photoshop to save you a crap ton of work.

 

[appltech]

Hi! As i understand, you use only Preview to resize the photos, right?
Also, what do you mean by "Mac stores all of the original files, even once the resized files have been deleted off the computer" - do they end up in trash once the picture was resized or there's a hidden folder where the originals are kept?

 

[bierce85]

Hi! As i understand, you use only Preview to resize the photos, right?
Also, what do you mean by "Mac stores all of the original files, even once the resized files have been deleted off the computer" - do they end up in trash once the picture was resized or there's a hidden folder where the originals are kept?

That's correct, I use preview to resize and it keeps the "revisions" (original full size) hidden in a system folder, even after the files have all been deleted from the trash.

 

[bierce85]

Why not use an image editor that won't make revisions and get rid of the problem? Better ones will even let you setup batch jobs to automated the resize and save process. So, you can just point the batch job at all the photos for the day and go do something else.

Seems worth ten dollars a month for Photoshop to save you a crap ton of work.

Not sure what you mean by the batch thing, but the way preview does it is so easy I can't imagine it being much of a time saver. You just select all the images, open, hit apple + a then resize and it does them all in one shot.

Paying $10 a month just to not save revisions seems kind of superfluous to me. Do you know of an image editor thats cheap or free which will save without revisions?

 

[appltech]

Not sure what you mean by the batch thing, but the way preview does it is so easy I can't imagine it being much of a time saver. You just select all the images, open, hit apple + a then resize and it does them all in one shot.

Paying $10 a month just to not save revisions seems kind of superfluous to me. Do you know of an image editor thats cheap or free which will save without revisions?

@velocityg4 probably meant apps like Automator to create scripted work with files or routine tasks, it might be handy in this case. You can find it through spotlight or Finder in "Applications" folder

 

[velocityg4]

Not sure what you mean by the batch thing, but the way preview does it is so easy I can't imagine it being much of a time saver. You just select all the images, open, hit apple + a then resize and it does them all in one shot.

Paying $10 a month just to not save revisions seems kind of superfluous to me. Do you know of an image editor thats cheap or free which will save without revisions?

In Photoshop you can create actions. In this case reduce size by X%. Choose a source folder and destination or save. Then click OK and it'll process all the files.

The great thing about this being. If you have it simply save and close. It'll modify the files without any old revisions remaining.

As I don't use Preview for resizing. It sounded like you were doing a lot of extra work.

But if you don't want to spend $10 a month. It looks like Affinity Photo offers batch processing. I haven't tried it myself. But I expect it'll do the same.

GIMP is free. It also seems to offer Batch processing. But you have to use the command line.

@velocityg4 probably meant apps like Automator to create scripted work with files or routine tasks, it might be handy in this case. You can find it through spotlight or Finder in "Applications" folder

Automator would probably help too. By not having to setup the batch process each time. If you always reuse the same import folder for this action. Didn't think about that. But that probably would make it even simpler.

Automator would likely also work with any of the other mentioned programs.

In fact. It looks like you may even use Automator to batch process images. Although a few more actions would need to be added to clear the originals. https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/quickly-resize-images-mac-automator/

 

[Allyance]

You can use 'Recent' and sort by date, then select groups to delete.