Save disk space by deleting Address Book images

Jul 18, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: kirkmc

I noticed that my ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book folder was pretty big; more than 420 MB. On an SSD, a half a gigabyte is a big hit for something that just records contact information.

So I looked in that folder, and found some interesting sub-folders. First, at the top level, there was a 69 MB "Images" folder, which contains 2,672 items. Second, there was a "Sources" folder, which contained a sub-folder with one of those long names with numbers and letters; presumably my Mac's UUID. In that folder was another Images folder, this one at 345 MB, containing 13,353 items!

So I figured I could try and delete these folders and see what happened. When I re-opened Address Book, the application automatically re-loaded images for many of my contacts. These are contacts for whom I have iChat accounts or Twitter accounts. The new folder is 4 MB, and contains 161 items.

I don't know why the other folders contain so many items, but if your Address Book folder takes up a lot of space, try removing these folders (don't delete them right away, just in case) and see if this slims them down a bit, as it did for me.

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