Gigs of invisible photo files when I download from camera - Why?

[owen-b]

Hi all,

Recently spotted a weird thing happening when I download images from my Nikon D200. I use Image Capture, but not sure if that's the problem. Maybe it's not a problem - hopefully you guys can help.

Basically, when burning a DVD of images for a friend, I noticed that if I dragged over the folder that contained the downloaded images, the disc size in Toast matched the size of the folder, but that if I created a blank disc and just copied over the folder contents themselves, not the actual folder, the disc size was 1.5GB smaller.

???

So, I fired up TinkerTool and turned on Invisible Files in the Finder, and was shocked to discover that throughout my hard drive, in the folders I download photos into from my camera there are invisible 'photos' with a period at the start of their name (rendering them invisible) that are the size of a full high res photo each - essentially doubling the size of the folder. If I delete a photo in the Finder, it's invisible counterpart doesn't get deleted with it - so what the heck are they? They're taking up GB upon GB upon GB of space on my drive and I can't even see them unless I use TinkerTool.

 

[owen-b]

Me again. I've done a test which I think proves that Image Capture is causing this problem - at least, my copy seems to be!

I took three JPGs on my camera. I set up three folders on my hard drive - one to download into from Image Capture, one to download into from Photo Mechanic (which rocks, by the way - if you don't have it, get it!) and one to download to manually by dragging the images from the mounted memory card.

Image Capture - three JPGs and three 'invisible' files - double the space taken up on the hard drive: 21.2MB

Photo Mechanic - three JPGs and a .pmingest.dat file (32KB): 10.6MB

Manually - three JPGs: 10.5MB

I believe this conclusively proves that Image Capture is creating duplicate invisible files that are the same size as the visible JPG, doubling the space that's taken up on the hard drive, and for no apparent reason as other perfectly legitimate methods of image download do not do the same thing.

So if my camera creates a photo called OWN_1234.JPG, Image Capture will download:

OWN_1234.JPG
.OWN_1234.JPG_

The second file is the exact same size as the first, but cannot be seen. If I delete the first, the second does NOT go with it.

What's going on here, Apple?! Can I safely go through my hard drive since installing Leopard, find these duplicates and BIN THEM?

 

[owen-b]

UPDATE: Seems going into Image Capture options and turning off 'Embed Color Profile' stops the creation of the invisible image. I wonder why it was so large in the first place?

Can I still go through my other images and bin those invisible duplicates? It would create gigs and gigs of free space!

 

[VirtualTracy]

I just tested this myself using Tinker Tool and Image Capture and didn't experience the invisible file duplication ... I had the Embed Colour Profile ticked too ... I can however verify that I have recently witnessed this on my PC. I enabled the showing of hidden files/folders and was surprised to see a collection of jpg files appear when the originals had long since been deleted.

I don't have any clues at this stage but will look into it tomorrow as I'm off to my bed now ...

 

[owen-b]

Cheers VirtualTracy.

I've been investigating further with the aid of someone at Apple Discussions (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7359075#7359075). Turns out that Image Capture is taking my photos (complete with profile as embedded by the camera at origin) downloading them, making them invisible, duplicating them and embedding the selected profile into the duplicate.

If I open up one of the invisible files (sRGB, the profile selected in the camera) and compare it to it's visible counterpart (Camera RGB, as embedded by Image Capture), there's a barely perceptible increase in shadow detail in the sRGB image compared to the Camera RGB image.

I generally think I'm not gaining anything having Image Capture embed a profile as my camera already does that and it's creating this duplicate problem, so I'm turning that feature off in Image Capture. In fact, I may quit using Image Capture anyway, and just use Photo Mechanic from now on, as I can have that input IPTC copyright data into my images as they're downloaded, which is very useful to me.