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macOS keeps a huge wallpapers cache
- unethical_ban 4y ago"Delete cached wallpapers" should be art of a disk cleanup wizard, but I understand why they do it.
- dimitar 4y agoI got a MacBook Air 2020 with 128GB storage to use mostly for browsing and light dev and that quickly filled up. It's like the OS tries to obsolete the machine as quickly as possible. The biggest annoyance is Finder telling me most of the storage is used by "Other".
- keyle 4y agoTry something like disk inventory X. It's a life saver.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoMy longstanding favorite for this has been OmniDiskSweeper[0]. It's dead simple and I've been using it for just about the entirety of OS X's existence. [0]: https://www.omnigroup.com/more/ https://www.omnigroup.com/more/
- gtm1260 4y agoGotta put a word in for daisy disk! Maybe you're paying for some fancy animations, but by golly are they nice LOL.
- boopmaster 4y agoI second Daisy Disk. When I made the leap from Windows to mac in the early 00s I wanted something to replace the freeware “scanner” I had found so entirely useful. http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/ http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
- arthurcolle 4y agoDaisyDisk is great. Best $10 on an app I've ever spent (circa 2015)
- erwinh 4y agoSome of the best functional data vis out there. For those wondering the chart type used by daisy disk is called a zoomable sunburst.
- darkteflon 4y agoWhat’s the advantage of Daisy Disk over the built-in “About this Mac -> Storage -> Manage”? Always interested in lovely boutique MacOS software, but in this case the website doesn’t sell it well as an alternative to what’s already available.
- tehwebguy 4y agoPut my vote in for `ncdu` (just skip your iCloud folders)
- thuttinger 4y agoI agree, ncdu is a great and easy to use command line tool. On Mac OS, run for example: ncdu -x --exclude /Volumes --exclude /System/Volumes / This scans the root filesystem but excludes the Volume mounts specifically (the -x option to limit the scan to the current filesystem doesn't work properly on mac os). Navigate through the folders, sorted by size, from there. Press d to delete a folder.
- tehwebguy 4y agoOh wow thank you
- moralestapia 4y agoDisk Inventory X is great and that's how I found out the speech folder on my OS X was taking like 12GB.
- odysseus 4y agoThere's a useful Apple-created tool built right into the OS: 1. Cmd-space for Spotlight 2. Type Storage Management 3. Hit Review Files Now you can sort by largest files and quickly make an impact on space used. The only problem I had with Apple's storage management utility is that it kept reporting a Steam game using 27G when that game was long deleted (and Steam itself was deleted). To resolve this, I had to go to the ~/Library/Application Support directory and completely remove the Steam folder (which didn't actually have that 27G game anywhere in it.)
- wzyoi 4y agoThe iPhone is doing the same. The unremovable caches will kill your space with time. I remember the Apple Music app caching and never removing any songs you’ve listened to and not showing any space it uses in settings. But this behavior is not specific to the Apple Music app - any other can do it too. Any caches from social apps you use have a high chance of being untraceable - it all goes into "Other". Why? Try buying a model with a higher capacity to get an answer. I also saw this behavior with an Android device - where removing a messenger on my grandfather’s phone freed up 20+ GB of space.
- jimvdv 4y agoI once found 15gb+ of Spotify cache from my 256gb MacBook. Deleted the app and use the web player now.
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoPeople ask why everything is web apps and there's the answer - It's a layer of sandboxing that users have _at least some_ control over.
- jbverschoor 4y agoTeams web version has local storage of 2gb. The problem is developers don’t know what the hell they’re doing
- Spooky23 4y agoThe problem is devs have beefy computers with 2TB SSDs.
- jbverschoor 4y agoIn music, producers would listen to their mix on different audio systems, including crappy radios.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoNone of the 128GB range were viable in the slightest. They were all a borderline scam and even after deleting GarageBand etc the usable space was close to broken. Sorry but this line only existed to force people who know it’s a scam to pay $100 more Same deal with the 16gb iPhone lines.
- colejohnson66 4y agoAs someone with a 128 GB model, I manage just fine. This is not the same as selling 16 GB models 3 or so years ago (that was ridiculous). It’s only a “scam” if you’re someone that needs more space and thinks having a “just fine” lower tier is a scam.
- ecedeno 4y agoThey were, and still are viable devices to some people. I only upgraded from a 128gb mbp and a 16gb iphone this year, after using them for 7 and 6 years respectively. Storage was never an issue with the laptop, and only became a problem with the iphone in the last couple of years.
- crazygringo 4y agoNot for most. I used a 16 GB iPhone SE with only a handful of apps for a while, but the biggest problem was the NY Times app where I get my news. Its cache will grow without bound, and once it would get to ~2 GB every few weeks I'd have to uninstall and reinstall the app to delete the cache. (Later on they created an option in settings to delete the cache.) I thought the 16 GB phone would work for me since I keep everything in the cloud -- no downloaded photos/music/nothing. Nope, and it was all because of app caches. I got so sick of having to uninstall and reinstall some app literally every week to clear its cache.
- jmull 4y agoThere are two kinds of people who don't need a lot of disk space on their laptop: 1. Those with few big things - these people just don't need a lot of disk space 2. Those with lots of big things - no matter what you do your laptop can't hold everything, so you have a different place for the overflow anyway. Personally, I think 128GB is crazy small, but it's been working fine for my wife for years, so what do I know?
- lostgame 4y agoIt’s borderline criminal that these were sold with soldered-on SSD’s that can never be upgraded. It makes piles of otherwise completely useful laptops unusable pieces of shit. Same with the RAM. The environmental damage alone that comes from this practice is heart wrenching. No possible performance benefits can be worth the damage it does.
- derefr 4y ago“Other” is probably 90% from ~/Library/Application Support/. Because apps like Chrome are too lazy to split things out of there to make them legible to the OS — e.g. putting their cache dirs under ~/Library/Caches/, etc.
- asddubs 4y agoi'm amazed that they still sell/sold 128gb versions that late. I remember deciding never to get a computer with that small a hard drive again a bit less than 10 years ago. it clutters up so fast.
- tomcam 4y agoI’m old enough to remember when 128GB meant something
- justinator 4y ago> The folder path is: Macintosh SSD/Users/[yourHome]/Library/Containers/Photos/Data/Library/Application Support/Photos Desktop Certainly isn't a ~/Library/Containers/Photos/Data/Library/Application Support/Photos Desktop in my home.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI don't have one, either. I suspect it gets formed, when we use the Photos App to set the desktop. I have always used the PrefPane.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoYes if you don’t use Photos to set the wallpapers, then you don’t have it.
- MiscIdeaMaker99 4y agoThat explains it. Also, the path that I have is as follows. ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Photos/Data Mine's a killer 55 MB.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoCorrect, mine is few MB (now). Just don't set the wallpapers via Photos in the future, or remember to clean this folder.
- Hamuko 4y agoPost should probably be titled "macOS Photos keeps a huge wallpapers cache", since it's not actually tied to the macOS wallpaper mechanism.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoYes maybe but Photos only creates a copy of the file/image in order to be used from macOS (due to Sandboxing). So it's more a macOS connected to Photos feature than Photos alone. ...in the end, it's just a mess.
- ryandrake 4y agoI really wish OSes would stop using my filesystem as a dumping ground for rando metadata their developers keep generating and finding no other place for. Between .DS_Store, .Trash, desktop.ini (on Windows), and all these various "caches" garbage heaps they randomly dump into my directories, I feel I have less and less control over what I'm keeping on my own hard drive by default. A hard drive that I purchased, not some developer in Cupertino. Yes, I know some of these can be turned off if you dig deep enough in settings, but the behavior should not be on by default.
- hcarvalhoalves 4y agoTo disable .DS_Store files: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
- saagarjha 4y ago…of course, only on external disks.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoAre internal disks likely to use a non-mac-native filesystem?
- berkut 4y agoIt's annoying for backing up directories or sharing directories between systems...
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoThen they would be external and the above solution would work?
- berkut 4y agoNo... Use case is taking a copy (via say tar) of a directory hierarchy on a MacOS drive, and copying that to another system (Linux), and untarring... then you've got all the .DS_store files everywhere... Not the end of the world, but annoying...
- Legion 4y agoIn one of those random coincidences, I recognize OP's username because just last night I was reading their forum comments on the OpenWRT forum about the Netgear WAX202. Was trying to decide if picking one up at a $30 sale price would make sense as a replacement for an older device, the R7800. OP did not find it to be so after their testing, and as such, my $30 remained in my pocket.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoAhah yes, it’s me. Now the AX doesn’t work perfectly with OpenWrt but the devs are doing a great work and every day the support is going better. Anyway, also with the Negear firmware, the WAX202 has less coverage than the R7800 but if you’re near it, it’s faster of course.
- 323 4y agoUnfortunately lots of apps keep large caches. For example almost all electron apps keep the last two or so versions around when they auto-update. And since Electron apps are around 250 MB that's 0.5 GB of old versions per app. I recently discovered a big cache - in terms of file number, 6000 files - of basically every edit I did in the last 6 months in VS Code - called Local History. Also, every directory you launch VS Code in will have a workspace cache associated with it, it can be 200 MB if you have C++ files in it, and VS Code will not remove it when you delete the original dir. And so on... I wish they would all integrate into a master clear caches system app, where you would have the opportunity of seeing them and clearing them. A bit like on Android.
- cyberge99 4y agoCheck out DaisyDisk. It shows how much space is “purgable” (cache files like this, etc).
- killjoywashere 4y agoI love DaisyDisk. Easily one of my top 20 apps of all time.
- elevaet 4y agoI agree! It's worth paying for for the time and the disk space it helps you save. Beautiful visual and UX design.
- Hellion 4y ago> Apple’s storage prices are terribly high, the fuller a SSD is, the less it will last, why keep useless files You knew you were buying soldered flash when you bought a modern Mac. If you want to save money, or heaven forbid, have a user serviceable laptop, the XPS 13 is one excellent option.
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- lilyball 4y agoAre these cached files marked as purgeable? If they are, then what's the big deal?
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoIf it was marked as purgeable, since the 2019 it should have been purged. Instead the folder is still here and keeps growing.
- olliej 4y agoAssuming that they are purgeable (which I would guess they aren't) purging doesn't happen by date, it happens when disk space is needed. The whole point of purgeable storage is to keep stuff around where having it persist improves the user experience, but if necessary it can be reconstructed. Simply evicting anything older than X isn't particularly sensible if there isn't any pressure on diskspace. The same thing generally happens for purgeable memory - if there isn't memory or battery life pressure there's no reason to evict anything.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoI know how the cache works, your point is perfectly correct BUT this folder is not exactly a cache folder, due to Sandboxing of macOS this folder is where macOS stores a copy (creates a new file/photo) in oder to be used as a wallpaper from the other macOS resources. If you set 123.jpg as a wallpaper today, you change it tomorrow with 321.jpg and you will set again 123.jpg in "x" time (few days), then macOS will not use again the file created with 123.jpg but it will create a new folder with the same wallpaper. As the cache should work. This is just a pointless behavior of macOS, for semplicity I haven't write it on the post but maybe I should add this... If it was a cache folder, a really cache -useful- folder I wouldn't have said to delete it.
- dusing 4y agoIn Ventura you have to click to download most wallpaper options, so they must have recognized the issue.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoUnfortunately no, the Ventura behavior is another thing, you simply have to download the image to use it as a wallpaper (in order to don't have a huge folder in "/System/Library/Desktop\ Pictures" . I don't know if macOS Ventura fixes this behavior of Photos, I'll try when it will be out of beta.
- NobodyNada 4y agoUgh, I got bitten by this recently. I have a little program that downloads the latest satellite imagery from NOAA [1] and sets it as my desktop background every 5 minutes. One day I was wondering where the heck all my storage went...and found a 200GB wallpaper cache. [1]: https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/latest.jpg https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/l...
- handedness 4y agoOut of curiosity, how do you have it set up? I've done something similar via cron and Automator, but it's pretty kludgy.
- NobodyNada 4y agoMine’s also a little kludgy, it’s a like 50-line Swift menu bar app. The cron job is a good idea; it’s probably a little cleaner.
- handedness 4y agoThat's cool. One would think mine's cleaner, but it's got its own problems involving it not recognizing a new image as different if the filename is unchanged, and even if I do staggered updates the only way to reliably make sure it takes every single time is to quit the Finder, which I of course refuse to do. It will, at times, decide it doesn't want to take for hours on end, with an image that updates every ~10-15 minutes, and then will later decide to start updating again, with no other state change having apparently happened to instigate it (e.g., rebooting, logging the session out, etc.). It may just be my experience, but over time macOS is behaving more and more irregularly in more and more ways, for completely inscrutable reasons.
- rolfrp 4y agomacOS and 3rd party caches are out of control, so much so that I made an app for that about 12 years ago. It's freemium but the cache/3rd party quick clean is totally free and I don't really nag - https://www.iboostup.com https://www.iboostup.com or the App Store; unfortunately adware is becoming a problem on macOS too so it handles that as well. Users that opt in to stats have collectively freed petabytes of data. Requires El Cap or above, I update monthly so always supports the latest.
- rolfrp 4y agoupdate: just released v10.5 that removes this huge wallpaper cache as part of Quick Clean, among other things. More info https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_M5GdnncxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_M5GdnncxA - about to submit it to Apple.
- userbinator 4y agoI'm not by any means a regular user of macOS but whenever I've had to use it, it's had the impression of a sleek and elegant face with much worse below the surface, and this is no different. It makes sense to make a copy when you set an image as a wallpaper, but what doesn't make sense is to keep that copy (with an automatically generated unique name!?!?) even after another wallpaper is set. But, looking at the "wrong way" and guessing at the implementation, I have an idea how this happened: "Share" makes a copy with a unique name, presumably to avoid conflicting with anything else, and then tells the OS to set that as the wallpaper. I wouldn't even call this a "cache", but a "leak".
- TillE 4y agoEverything is a mess under the surface. It's more or less impossible to write something as complex as a modern desktop OS and keep all your code and behavior neat and tidy.
- oneplane 4y agoThis is perfectly elegant. The desktop picture and the photos for it are segmented from the rest of the system in a container (similar to Virtual Locations on Windows) that the app can access instead of letting every random app access all your files at once without you having any control about it. Regarding caching: generally, it's up to each individual developer (and sometimes even different teams within a company) to do this right. The only place where developers are 'forced' to do it right is '/tmp/' because that is supposed to get nuked every reboot.
- userbinator 4y agothat the app can access instead of letting every random app access all your files at once without you having any control about it. That has nothing at all to do with this idiocy of using a different name every time, and not even thinking that it could be a problem to automatically create effectively "orphaned" files that no one would know about until it's too late.
- 4y ago
- sbr464 4y agoThe (Apple) News App on macOS also uses a huge cache. I’ve seen it 5-10GB+. Without even using it regularly. I think to remove it I had to deselect it as an iCloud service in settings.
- oneplane 4y agoMy desktop background picture cache is 0GB. Perhaps I don't switch enough (mostly between one of the built-in ones or a solid color). The most annoying caches are the ones generated by IDEs, they generally mix application-cache, plugin-cache and AST-cache all in one big cache so you don't really know if there is some huge Grails cache in there, if it's an old IDE version or if it's simple a runtime/electron/dotnet/java cache that got embedded with the rest. They are generally also either not versioned at all so not even the app would know what to nuke, and when they are versioned the old cache isn't getting wiped anymore because only the old version of the app would do that. A OS-enforced cache would help, but then people would complain that they don't feel "in control"... (spoiler: unless you are an OS developer, it is highly unlikely that you ever really were in control, at most you might have had some feelings of control, or a measure of control that isn't realistic)
- indemnity 4y agoAnd yet, it cannot for the life of it preserve the wallpaper selection. Regularly, on a random basis, it will forget my wallpaper selection and revert to one of the stock ones. Intel or M1, it's been like this for years. Not sure how hard it is to preserve my selection here, but ok.
- wedn3sday 4y agoI discovered these giant stupid wallpapers not to long ago when I was cleaning up my partners computer. They were taking up something like 20% of the total disc space on the machine, and there's absolutely no way to get rid of them. Very annoying!
- nr2x 4y agoI left Serato indexing music overnight and it created a 300gb cache. Which was actually impressive tbh.
- mavarex 4y agoncdu I am using brew for installation.
- tomcam 4y agoCan someone explain why on earth a wallpaper cache is necessary for anything? Admittedly I just use whatever wallpaper comes with the current version of macOS and leave it for a year until the next version comes out. but even if I loved to change wallpaper two or three times a day, what would be the purpose of caching it?
- unwind 4y agoWow, I can understand why that feels wasteful. But ... it boggles my mind how someone can change their wallpaper in my mind) 435 times in roughly 3 years. That's a new image every (365 * 3) / 435 = ~2.5 days, all year around. Maybe less if not all files were old images, I didn't read the screenshots too closely. I'm generally not even aware of the desktop background image (and thus never spend time to change it), it's always covered by actual application windows. Interesting.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoYes usually I don’t change the wallpaper every 2/3 days but I download 10/20 photos and I try to set each as a wallpaper. This one/two time per month about so the average is correct.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- matyasrichter 4y agoAutomatic daily wallpapers.
- Synaesthesia 4y agoBy the way, one easy way to find what’s taking up space in your Mac, using finder, is enable “Show View Options" in the "View" menu and choosing "Calculate all sizes", you can set to default to that if you want as well. Then using list view you can sort all folders by size. It takes a while to calculate of course, faster with an SSD.
- xg15 4y agoI think this would require a shift in mindset of programmers to change. As long as mantras like "space is cheap", "that memory would have been unused anyway" and "premature optimization is the root of all evil"* are frequently being passed on as good advice, we'll see stuff like this. (* I know how the actual quote is meant, and there is a lot of truth to it: Micro-optimisations where the only practical reason is that the code invites you to do it are a bad idea. However in my experience, the quote is often misunderstood as arguing against any form of optimization. The quote is often used to justify code that's not just unoptimized but hilariously inefficient.)
- nicolas_t 4y agoI've given up... Now I always order the 4TB option with any new mbp I order. Like this I never have to think about diskspace. I know for a fact that there's a lot of useless junk that I shouldn't need. I know that devs are lazy about cleaning up disk space and long are the days of my 120mb hard disk on my 486 but after struggling with disk space growing uncontrollably in a 1TB ssd, I just can't be bothered dealing with that. By doing this, I'm part of the problem. By not establishing boundaries and refusing to install apps like Xcode that are programmed to put as much trash as possible, I contribute to making it acceptable for developers to treat us like this but it's a fight I'll admit I've lost.
- haileys 4y agoI feel you. My macbooks have always reached the point of feeling very cramped for storage and I find myself juggling for disk space more often than I'd like. This is mostly because I simply won't pay an extra thousand dollars - what Apple charges for maxed storage in my currency. I recently ordered a Framework laptop. It's yet to arrive, but I'm already excited about the fact that I could just order a very large, very fast, top of the line NVMe drive from a PC parts vendor for only a few hundred dollars.
- addandsubtract 4y agoInstead of getting a bigger internal disk, I opted for an external USB-C drive. The one I got (SanDisk Portable SSD) has 2TB of storage and transfers data at 1GB/s, so fast enough for everyday uses. I use it mostly for cold storage of larger files I rarely need and backups. So instead of spending $600 on the internal 2TB, my external drive only cost me $200 and is small enough to fit into any pocket.
- can16358p 4y agoProbably similar things going in all the other Apple stack. I backed up my phone which was using around 110GB data. Restored it to a new phone and voila, it was using 70GB-ish after downloading all the apps again and syncing everything off iCloud. Everything was intact, there wasn't anything like Music etc cached in that 110GB (I deleted all these beforehand), photos were still high resolution stored locally... everything was intact, with around 40GB less usage. Not surprised at this wallpapers cache at all.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoYes, on the iPhone is even more subtle because you can’t have access to the folders inside the filesystem. Anyway I’m using less than 50GB on my iPhone, is hard to keep the space low because you have to check lots of things. For example I had almost 1GB of Health data that were steps and other things from years ago but I wasn’t able to free this space also after that I deleted all the records inside the Health app. Finally I discovered that these data were from Apple Watch cached data, I had to disable the health app on the Apple Watch and then I went able to retrieve back my GB (3/4) of cache. In this situation the records were useful (if you need it) but it was very difficult to find how to clear this space if you don’t want all these data. I’ve never thought that were data from Apple Watch stored inside the “other space” on the iPhone. At least not some GB.
- pdimitar 4y agoOS-wide caching service when? Integrate automatic management of maximum cache size and we're done. Having carte blanche access to $HOME -- or any other directory really -- should not be a given. A lot of these problems can and should be fixed by OS services or, if these huge and wealthy companies can't be bothered, they can at least produce the interfaces/contracts and have other vendors implement them. I honestly didn't expect that in 2022 we'll still be needing disk cleaners. It was somewhat expected back in 2002 but today... it's really shameful.