When you have a MacBook Pro with a 200 GB Hard Drive, space is precious! I obviously have several external hard disks, but there are things that I need to always have with me, which means on my laptop.
Yesterday I knew about this great application called DaisyDisk, which helps you find where your Mac’s disk space has gone, and here is a screenshot of the application:
Now that you’ve found what is eating all your hard drive space, you have to work on it!
When I ran the Scan, I found that two main folders where taking all the space: 1. Music, and 2. Images
1. Music
I can say I have a lot of music files, but hey, almost 100 GB? That’s a lot, even for me.
Now, the tip that I’m going to give here, might not be for just “everyone”. My tip is about music quality, not your personal taste, but the actual kbps (kilobit per second).
If like me, you mostly listen to your music from your computer or iPod, through standard headphones, if you don’t use much your music for professional needs or if your music simply never comes out from some amazing-huge-highquality speakers, then MP3 quality for your tracks is just… FINE.
If you go through your iTunes library an click on the “Bit Rate” tab, you will sort your music by bit rate, and you’ll see different numbers: some are 192, some are 256, some are 128 etc.
A track that comes from a CD usually is 320 kbps, which is a very good quality; unfortunately your iPod or your computer (unless you have a special sound card with great speakers) is not capable to emit that quality or if it does you might not hear the difference with a lower quality one.
MP3 quality is 128 kbps, that’s why the same song in a CD quality is 30 MB and in mp3 is only 3 MB (around 10 times smaller). So what to do? Simple: convert all your music to mp3 quality; you will have a good quality and you will save a lot of space in your disk.
Now this is a quick “how to” if you want to do that from iTunes, but there are other tools out there to do that.
First, go in your Preferences panel in iTunes (iTunes > Preferences), under the “General” tab click on “Importing Settings”. Select “AAC Quality” and “128 kbps”, click “OK” and close.
Now from the list of songs select the ones that are higher than “128 kbps”, right-click and choose “Create AAC”. iTunes will start creating a 128 version of each song as a duplicate (you can see that in the “Converting” tab on the left column. Don’t deselect the songs that are beeing converted, because when it’s done you’ll want to delete them and only keep the 128 kbps version ones.
Don’t forget to empty your trash and run Daisydisk again, you’ll see how much disk space you saved. I saved around 30 GB!
2. Images
For all the projects I do (websites, icons, banners…) I always create a folder called “Assets” where I keep all the original files that the client gives to me (images, logos, brand guidelines…). This takes a lot of space too, especially images.
This tip is not for “everyone” neither. I’m a web guy, I don’t do print, so all those huge-high-def-high-quality-raw-tiff images that the clients provides, are kind of useless for me. All the pictures that I use will end up being on the web, so TIF format: no need, 10000 px wide: no need, 300 dpi: no need. I didn’t want to destroy the pixels size, because that might come in handily, but I definitely took off all the rest. So for example, I have this 4679 x 3327 pixels image called “service.tif”, its weight is 60 MB, I open it up with Photoshop. I downsize the resolution to 72 dpi and keep the same pixels dimentions. I save it as “service.jpg”. Result: 18.9 MB. What a difference! Keep doing that for all your huge-large-big images and you’ll see how much disk space you can save. I saved more than 10 GB!
Tags: App, Images, iTunes, Music, Organize, Photoshop, Software, Tutorial
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