Free up space on a Apple MAC / OSX
Posted on Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 15:29 by Hubertus A. Haniel
Apple Mac laptops are beautiful devices but they do cost a lot of money and usually come with very limited disk space which gets eaten up with mostly your photo library if you have an iPhone as well. - This will come and haunt you when you want to perform an update and suddenly your Mac says it does not have enough disk space. - Well here is a simple fix how to solve it.
By default on you Mac you will find it will download all your photos that you take on your other apple devices will download to the Mac in full quality. So first thing you need to do is go into you photo library preferences and change "Download Originals to this Mac" to "Optimize Mac storage"
Now this will not free up space straight away unless you are actually running out of space. - To make this happen keep open your photo library and open up a couple of terminal windows. In one of these windows being in your home directory you can start a job to fill up your available space with "dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.tmp". You can use the other window with "df -h ." to watch how your disk space shrinks and also do a "du -sh Pictures" to see how that directory shrinks.
Once you think that you have shrunk your photo library sufficiently you can kill the dd job and remove bigfile.tmp which should then give you sufficient space on your drive to perform your upgrade.
Posted in System - Apple / OSX (RSS)
