High Sierra shows wrong disk usage for photos in information

disk-spacehigh sierrasystem-information

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I installed high Sierra a few months ago and nowadays there seems to be a problem with System Information.app, it always shows the disk usage wrong like for example System 40GB but it shows photos to be 0KB even though I have 19GB worth photos and DaisyDisk reports correct disk usage.

I have tried booting into safe mode and rebooting, this persists after restarts

Screenshot:
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I have run this scan as root user not admin.

so how do fix this missing photo sizing in system information.app?

Best Answer

I recently ran into this - on my 500GB SSD, my free space was only 5% where I expected more like 75%. I found an answer in a blog that worked for me:

Apple state that they automatically remove local snapshots when disk space is low, but their definition of low is apparently only 5GB of free space remaining – not really much free working space in 2017 when you might want scratch space of 22GB for 1 hour of 4k 30FPS footage.

On older MacOS releases, it was possible to disable the local snapshot feature entirely, this doesn’t seem to be the case with High Sierra – but it does appear to be possible to force an immediate purge of local snapshots with the following command:

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4

From the tmutil manpage:

thinlocalsnapshots mount_point [purge_amount] [urgency]

Thin local Time Machine snapshots for the specified volume.

When purge_amount and urgency are specified, tmutil will attempt (with urgency level 1-4) to reclaim purge_amount in bytes by thinning snapshots.

If urgency is not specified, the default urgency will be used.

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