One solution to finding missing free space on an iPod

Mar 08, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Over the weekend, I plugged in my old-style 80GB iPod for the first time in, well, a long time -- so long that the battery needed to be charged a bit before it would even sync. Once the sync started, things seemed to go well, but near the end of the photos section, iTunes displayed a message telling me there wasn't enough room to copy all my photos.

This was a bit odd, because best as I could recall, my iPod had about 20GB of free space the last time I synched. And while it had been a while, there's no way I took enough photos to fill 20GB -- especially at the iPod's resolution (I don't sync full-sized copies).

I noticed that the Other (orange) section of the Capacity gauge in iTunes was huge -- basically all the remaining space was used up by Other. Switching to the Finder, I quickly scanned through the iPod's various folders (it was set to enable disk use) with the Inspector open (Command-Option-I), and they all looked normal in size ... until I got to Photos » Thumbs. This one was over 20GB! Given my entire iPhoto library (at native resolution) is all of 45GB, I figured there was something wrong.

The fix? I first disabled photo sync in iTunes, then trashed the contents of the Thumbs folder in the Finder, and emptied the trash. Once that was done, I re-enabled photo syncing, and let the iPod sync all the photos back. When it was done, I once again had all my photos on the iPod and 20GB+ of free space on the device, and the Other section showed only 1.7GB used.

I have no idea what happened to the Thumbs folder, but if you find yourself with a similarly-overflowing iPod for no apparent reason, it's possible this folder is the culprit on your device as well.

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