Hey all! I have an external drive that I'm putting photos on. The drive is formatted as exFAT to use on both mac and PC. After organizing them on my mac, I was using the drive on my PC and noticed that "Properties" (the windows equivalent of "get info" in Finder, basically) was showing usually double the amount of files actually in the folder! So I ticked the "show hidden items" button in Windows and bam, there's a bunch of files with identical names to each of my photos, but hidden, starting with a period, and 4KB each - no more, no less. I included a picture below of how they appear in File Explorer on windows. I *cannot* see these files in the Finder on macOS, even by enabling hidden files, but I can see them on windows. I assume they're thumbnails or something like that - is this something that macOS does? Pictures below, any help appreciated.
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"Thumbnail"(?) files visible on Windows but not macOS for the same drive?
- Thread starter harrisonjr98
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Hmm. Is this only with image files? I also have music on that drive and there’s no hidden files. If I were to ever move the files to an APFS drive, would everything be good or would it move them without metadata?
Those are not thumbnails, those are resource fork files store as a separate file, more info on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork
You can safely delete them if the related file is a video or an image.
You can safely delete them if the related file is a video or an image.
So if you don't mind me asking, if you know a lot about this kind of thing, what might've led macOS to generate resource forks for my photo library but not my music library?