Posted by Gary Gulash on April 19, 2011 at 10:25 PM
I have been using an iMac 24 " for a while. If I right click on the hard drive icon I see that I have a Capacity of 297 GB, 1.95 GB available and 295 Gb used. So, almost used up my hard drive space on the iMac. I use my card reader to down load my photos to Lacie external hard drives. I rename the files in Nikon View NX, then I import the files into Lightroom. I ADD the photos to the Lightroom catalogue without moving them. I select certain photos to process, first in Lightroom then export them to my iMac where I do additional editing in PS Elements and Nikon NX. I name these files according to content. The hard drives are backed up by Time Machine onto another external Hard Drive assigned specifically for this purpose.
So, my question is why would my iMac be out of space when I really don't edit that many photos to the final stage (where they are stored on the IMac). My work flow is my home grown concoction and just sort of evolved ?!? Any idea what's going on here? Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Gary.
Posted by Richard Ditch on April 19, 2011 at 10:50 PM
Raw NEF files will eat up disk space. So will large iTunes libraries. So will Time Machine backups.
I transfer NEF files with Nikon Transfer 2 via a card reader to an external Firewire drive. I delete obviously bad shots on first view in ViewNX 2. I process them in Photoshop CS3, reading from and writing to the external drive. The only images that make it to my internal hard drive are the jpegs ready to post somewhere.
In your situation I would:
1. empty the trash!
2. look at the settings in Lightroom to see if it is saving copies somewhere on your internal drive (I'm not familiar with how it works so can't say which settings to check or where to look for folders of raw files).
3. look at the settings for Time Machine to make sure it isn't writing backups to a second location.
4. look for folders of raw images in the Pictures folder under your regular user identity and under any Lightroom or PS Elements folders.
5. use Spotlight to search for one of the files you renamed and processed to see how many versions of it turn up and the path to each of them.
If there are other people in your household with user accounts on your Mac I'd worry about somebody saving a lot of video downloads.
There's a cool open source tool called GrandPerspective, that gives you a visual map of you hard drive. Mousing over the colored blocks that symbolize your files will give you the name; the images gives you the comparative size. You can do the whole hard drive or zoom in on individual folders. It will help you figure out what's taking out how much room.
So, my question is why would my iMac be out of space when I really don't edit that many photos to the final stage (where they are stored on the IMac). My work flow is my home grown concoction and just sort of evolved ?!? Any idea what's going on here? Any help greatly appreciated.
It sounds to me as though the computer needs to use some of the hard drive space for all that file handling, albeit temporarily. Especially if you're a little shy on RAM. I'm the furthest thing from a techy, but I keep my internal hard drive less than half full most of the time, which really seems to speed up some operations. In my experience, even if you could pull off what you're trying to do, your machine is probably running comparatively slow now.
Why keep so much on your internal drive?
Posted by Garry Revesz on April 20, 2011 at 3:20 PM
You already have a few good suggestions which boil down to basic housekeeping stuff. I would also suggest that you dump any large Lightroom Previews for files you are no longer working on. They make it easier and faster to get your work done but they take up more HD space.
However, I'm curious why you go through so many steps to import your images? Just to offer a little background, last April 2010, i realized that if I was going to be importing approx 500 images/week, I needed a system that was going to be bulletproof, from import to final deliverable. I am just at the tail end of that year long process, but now I have a system and workflow that easily and quickly catalogues every image with a minimum of pain, and better yet, I can find any image I created in the last 10 years in a matter of seconds. So I ask the question because when I do an import, I import directly into Lightroom (after quickly culling the bad ones) and all the images have my standard metadata added, re-named, and converted to DNG, all at the same time and now I'm ready to work on them. Saves me a ton of time.
Garry
Posted by Richard Ditch on April 21, 2011 at 11:38 PM
What have you discovered to be the disk hog problem?
Posted by Gary Gulash on April 22, 2011 at 11:16 AM
Thank you for the suggestions everyone. I have been busy at work and fighting a flu bug so haven't had a chance to investigate the issue yet. Will post an update when I get at it.
Posted by Gary Gulash on April 22, 2011 at 3:35 PM
Not doing very well so far, downloaded GrandPerspective, but the program won't open. Hank I totally agree, why keep so much on the internal hard drive, this is the problem I am referring to. I can't even determine what on earth is on the main hard drive.
Posted by David Bostedo on April 22, 2011 at 5:53 PM
I don't know Macs, but I think they're Linux-like underneath, so if you can get a terminal window (command line, console, whichever you call it) you could try this command :
du -skh *
That should list the size of all files and directories in the current location. Then if you see an unusually large one you can go into it ("cd directory_name") and run the "du" command again....and on and on.
Discussion
8 repliesSo, my question is why would my iMac be out of space when I really don't edit that many photos to the final stage (where they are stored on the IMac). My work flow is my home grown concoction and just sort of evolved ?!? Any idea what's going on here? Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Gary.
I transfer NEF files with Nikon Transfer 2 via a card reader to an external Firewire drive. I delete obviously bad shots on first view in ViewNX 2. I process them in Photoshop CS3, reading from and writing to the external drive. The only images that make it to my internal hard drive are the jpegs ready to post somewhere.
In your situation I would:
1. empty the trash!
2. look at the settings in Lightroom to see if it is saving copies somewhere on your internal drive (I'm not familiar with how it works so can't say which settings to check or where to look for folders of raw files).
3. look at the settings for Time Machine to make sure it isn't writing backups to a second location.
4. look for folders of raw images in the Pictures folder under your regular user identity and under any Lightroom or PS Elements folders.
5. use Spotlight to search for one of the files you renamed and processed to see how many versions of it turn up and the path to each of them.
If there are other people in your household with user accounts on your Mac I'd worry about somebody saving a lot of video downloads.
It sounds to me as though the computer needs to use some of the hard drive space for all that file handling, albeit temporarily. Especially if you're a little shy on RAM. I'm the furthest thing from a techy, but I keep my internal hard drive less than half full most of the time, which really seems to speed up some operations. In my experience, even if you could pull off what you're trying to do, your machine is probably running comparatively slow now.
Why keep so much on your internal drive?
However, I'm curious why you go through so many steps to import your images? Just to offer a little background, last April 2010, i realized that if I was going to be importing approx 500 images/week, I needed a system that was going to be bulletproof, from import to final deliverable. I am just at the tail end of that year long process, but now I have a system and workflow that easily and quickly catalogues every image with a minimum of pain, and better yet, I can find any image I created in the last 10 years in a matter of seconds. So I ask the question because when I do an import, I import directly into Lightroom (after quickly culling the bad ones) and all the images have my standard metadata added, re-named, and converted to DNG, all at the same time and now I'm ready to work on them. Saves me a ton of time.
Garry
du -skh *
That should list the size of all files and directories in the current location. Then if you see an unusually large one you can go into it ("cd directory_name") and run the "du" command again....and on and on.