For photographers, it's not a case of if but rather when will you run out of disk space. Before you splash the cash on yet more hard drives, try this approach first.
Blake Rudis of f64 Academy is back once again with another useful video on the subject of freeing up disk space on your computer. Rudis suggests two handy programs that will help you to see what exactly is causing your drives to fill up so quickly. For Windows users, he recommends using Treesize and for Mac, a program called Daisydisk. Both pretty much do the same job of showing you a breakdown of what is on your hard drive. Unsurprisingly, for us photographers, the biggest contributor to our storage problem will be our images, and these third-party programs will show you exactly which particular folders are the biggest culprits. Another useful feature that is shown in the video is the ability to see the last time you used any particular files on your machine. If you have pictures on your computer that haven't seen the light of day for a few years, then they most likely won't be missed if you move them onto other storage options.
Hopefully, many of you are already using similar programs, but if this isn't the case, then why not try using something to help you manage your files? By having a better understanding of what is on your hard drives, you'll be able to back up and organize things much more easily. If that wasn't enough, clearer hard drives will help to keep your machines running faster for longer, which in turn could delay spending thousands of dollars on unnecessary upgrades.
Do you use either of the programs mentioned above? Have any recommendations for similar programs that help to free up disk space? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below.
Lead image by Wir_Sind_Klein on Pixabay, used under Creative Commons.
I use Treesize Pro (much more useful than the free version) on all my computers. Love it!
This free tool for mac is also quite useful in finding out which files are hogging hdd-space: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
Thank you for a nice set of reminders and suggestions. I'm not sure what information is presented by PCs, but all the file type and size info can be found on a Mac just by looking at the Finder windows in List view...without the pie charts of course.
The most important thing that nobody is talking about here is the fact that this Blake Rudis guy and Matt Kloskowski have the exact same voice!
why not just use ncdu? Is there better tool for data management?
If you want to find and remove duplicated files, you can try DuplicateFilesDeleter.