How to Prevent Image Capture From Taking up Too Much Space on Your Mac
If you’re wondering why free space on your Mac keeps getting smaller, smaller, and smaller – even if you haven’t used your Mac that much – there is a bizarre bug in the Apple Image Capture app that can be blamed.
According to a recent blog post by NeoFinder , you should resist the urge to use the Image Capture app to transfer photos from connected devices to your desktop or laptop. If you do this and you happen to uncheck the “keep originals” button because you want the application to convert your .HEIC images to friendlier .JPEGs, the error occurs:
After that, Apple Image Capture will happily convert the HEIF files to JPG format when copied to your Mac. But it also adds 1.5MB of completely blank data to every photo file it creates! We discovered this massive bug purely by accident while working to further improve NeoFinder’s metadata editing capabilities using the so-called “ Hex Fiend “ Hex-Editor .
They continue:
Of course, this is a colossal waste of space, especially considering that Apple is seriously still selling new Macs with a ridiculously tiny 128GB internal SSD. Such a small disk quickly fills up with completely empty data.
For example, with just 1000 photos, this error eats up 1.5 GB of your precious and very expensive SSD disk space.
We’ve notified Apple about this new bug, which was already present in macOS 10.14.6, and maybe they can fix it this time without adding additional new bugs.
So what options do you have? First, you don’t need to use Image Capture app. If you’re not carrying a huge batch of photos, you can simply sync your iPhone or iPad’s photo library to iCloud and do the same on your Mac to view whatever you’ve captured. If that’s not an option, you can always just AirDrop your photos to your Mac, or just use Photos instead of capturing images (if possible).
If you do use Image Capture, just do not clear the Keep Originals checkbox. Leave this checkbox checked, which will dump a bunch of .HEIC files to your disk (at least on newer devices). From there, use a free third party file conversion app . You can also use a third-party application to remove extra data from .JPG files that Image Capture has already generated.