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Space Gremlin helps you free up hard drive space on your Mac

by Josh Helfferich Feb 14th 2011 at 10:00PM

Who knew gremlins could be so friendly? A new Mac app from Sean Christmann with the fantastic name of Space Gremlin is now available on the Mac App Store. This nifty little tool will help you to eat up all of the junk that's clogging up your Mac's precious hard drive space. It visualizes the contents of each of your drives in a really intuitive way: item squares that scale dynamically based on how large items are in relation to the parent folder or drive. This means that it's a perfect app for finding out which artist is taking up all that space in your iTunes folder, or which game is causing your Mac to run low on resources.

There are some other tools available, namely DaisyDisk 2 (which admittedly has a much prettier interface), but there's something delightfully utilitarian about Space Gremlin that's caused me to make it my go-to app for cleaning up my trusty old Mac Pro. Sure, it doesn't look the greatest, but here's my philosophy -- you don't need a shovel encrusted with rubies to move some dirty old junk.

I highly suggest that you take the demo of the app for a spin before you slam down the Washingtons for a copy in the Mac App Store, but either way, I'm sure you'll find Space Gremlin to be a pretty awesome utility. Just don't feed it after midnight.

Space Gremlin is available on the Mac App Store for a cool US$3.99.



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Who knew gremlins could be so friendly? A new Mac app from Sean Christmann with the fantastic name of Space Gremlin is now available on the...
 

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Razvan

iSlimPhoto is a much better alternative when you're low on disk space on the Mac, as you don't have to delete/lose anything.

iSlimPhoto resizes all the photos in your iPhoto library to the actual resolution of your Mac without losing any detail -- and saves between 60-90% of the space taken by the iPhoto library.

It preserves all the info, including albums, events, faces, places/geolocation info, EXIF data of each photo etc, and you can save the full resolution library at home, on a Time Capsule, external hard drive or iMac, while taking with you on your MacBook the slim version.

iSlimPhoto is available from the Mac App Store or here: www.iSlimPhoto.com.

February 15 2011 at 11:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ben

WhatSize has been doing this for years. It also can find duplicate files, remove unnecessary binaries (e.g. PPC binaries are not needed on an Intel machine), remove unneeded languages, and other tools.
http://WhatSizeMac.com

February 15 2011 at 10:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
cdbeshore

I use JDiskReport. Free and fits the bill.

February 15 2011 at 10:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Zach

For those interested, the visualization style is called a TreeMap

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/

-Z

February 15 2011 at 10:37 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Paul

Or I think the first program using a GUI to do it, OmniDiskSweeper, http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/

February 15 2011 at 10:09 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Uso

What's wrong with the free Disk Inventory X http://www.derlien.com/

February 15 2011 at 4:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dave

Daisy Disk is also a great way to visualize space left on your hard drive (no, I don't work for them, I just like the app).

February 15 2011 at 12:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
amcd41-newsletterz

I downloaded the demo, and see the floor plan, but haven't a clue what to do with it. I'm afraid I'll delete the wrong stuff. Is there an explanation someplace, as to how to use it? I feel like such a dummy.

February 15 2011 at 12:29 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jon

DiskInventoryX has done this for free for 7 years. It's been awhile since it was updated, but the current version works fine on 10.6.

February 14 2011 at 11:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Jon's comment
Andrew Lim

Indeed, I just used it last night to clear out some stuff... Very easy to use too

February 15 2011 at 12:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ben

I just downloaded the demo, and managed to free up nearly 100 Gb just through deleting unwanted videos and duplicated files. Well worth a look.

February 14 2011 at 11:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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