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Time Machine on macOS can chew up disk space for photographers

Public service announcement for photographers and anyone that add and delete lots of files on their Apple Mac computers.

If you’re using a Mac, and your disk seems to be filling up even though you’re deleting files, check if you’re using Time Machine (TM) for backups. If you are, Time Machine’s Snapshots is 99% going to be chewing up your disk. Here’s why…

Snapshots is macOS approach to create a restore point so you get your Mac to a known state. It does this by combining the last TM backup with a snapshot. The backup has all the files just before the snapshot and the snapshot has all the files that you have deleted since the backup.

So, let’s say you’ve just copied from your camera 1000 photos for editing and have now decided to move those 1000 photos to an external disk, NAS or just delete them. Even though you’ve deleted the 1000 photos, macOS has kept them in the Snapshot, and will keep them in Snapshots until a TM backup has been done. It will still keep those on your disk until at least 24 hours after the TM backup, because that’s what it does. So your 256GB or 512GB SSD is going to fill up pretty quickly and deleting files isn’t going to get you back your disk space until you’ve done a TM backup, and then 24 hours later.

But, luckily there’s a simple solution. Go into the Disk Utility App and choose Show APFS Snapshots in the View menu. Select your disk and you’ll see probably several Snapshots. Click on the – sign and you can delete the snapshots, start with the most recent going back to the earliest. And Voila. Disk space reclaimed. Of course, if you do that, you won’t be able to recover the files in the snapshot. But since you deleted them anyway, you probably don’t want them.

And, the way to avoid this and keep using Time Machine is to create a separate disk Volume that is excluded in Time Machine backups. You need to create a separate volume because excluding a Folder in TM won’t stop TM keeping the deleted files in the snapshot, it just stops TM from backing up that folder.

More technical details about snapshots here https://eclecticlight.co/2024/04/08/apfs-snapshots/

Nov 17, 2024 | Categories: Reviews, Tech, Tutorial | Comments Off on Time Machine on macOS can chew up disk space for photographers

Swapping a UDM Base for a UCG-Max

I’ve had a Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine for almost five years powering an NBN Fibre Gigabit service. Knowing that the probability of electronics that run 24/7 tend to go bang goes up every year it was time to swap it out for something more current and keep the UDM as a backup router/gateway.

Ubiquiti has released a lot of new equipment this year and one that is ticking a lot of boxes and have received good reviews is the Unifi Cloud Gateway Max, aka UCG-Max. This is essentially an upgraded UDM without a built in wifi access point. The UCG has not only the Network app that delivers the routing, VLAN and firewall, but several other applications in the Ubiquiti universe like Protect which is used to manage cameras. The other main feature is that it features 2.5Gbps ports and can route traffic at 1.5Gbps with a packet inspection firewall turned on.

Migrating from the UDM to the UCG is incredibly straightforward. Backup the system, and restore it to the new device. Unplug the UDM and replace it with the UCG. The following video shows how it’s done.

Oct 26, 2024 | Categories: Internet, Tech, Tutorial | Comments Off on Swapping a UDM Base for a UCG-Max

The book that inspired me to love design

When Apple created the Macintosh, Steve Jobs also created the Laserwriter. It was Steve’s interest in “typography, graphic layout, and font design” that led to the Apple Laserwriter and the birth of what was then known as desktop publishing. Consumers had for the first time access to beautiful proportionally spaced type and fonts without having to go to a specialist offset printer. Apple made a little booklet called The Basic Elements of Design and it’s a wonderful introduction to typography, page layout and text-based graphic design. To this day, it’s the book that inspired me to love text based design. While the booklet is out of print, you can download a PDF of it here.

Oct 07, 2024 | Categories: Design, Tutorial | Comments Off on The book that inspired me to love design

Use Cloudflare to Block Brute Force Login Attacks


The excellent Limit Login Attempts wordpress plugin will detect failed logins and put up its armoury of defences. Nothing showed its usefulness than seeing the number of attempts it detected. However, the plugin still requires WordPress to handle the failed attempt and only login attempts via http and https are handled. XML-RPC attacks and Bot-related attacks need another solution.

For my setup, I only need admin login to WordPress from one IP address. This is where Cloudflare’s content distribution network and it’s Web Application Firewall can provide excellent protection.

The WAF is extremely easy to setup and all you need to do is add the IP addresses that you want to allow into a rule that will block access except for the addresses you have specified (see screenshot).

This will block not only brute force login attempts but also XML-RPC and related attacks from even reaching the wordpress server.

Apr 07, 2024 | Categories: Tech, Tutorial | Comments Off on Use Cloudflare to Block Brute Force Login Attacks

Lightroom Tip: Review and Select Photos in Library and NOT Develop mode

I’ve been using Lightroom from the very first version and I’ve now just realised I’ve been reviewing and selecting my images in the wrong mode. Like many, I thought that if I created Standard and 1:1 Previews it would speed up Lightroom in scrolling from image to image. But LR was still excruciating slow in some situations, eg when an image has lots of complex adjustments, scrolling from or to that image would just bog LR down to a crawl. Especially if there were a sequence of images with heavy adjustments.

It turns out that for simply scrolling and selecting images, make sure you’re in the Library module and NOT the Develop module. In Library, LR will use the image’s standard preview and scrolling is lightning fast. You can make sure you’re in that mode with the keyboard shortcut “E”. It’s an extra key stroke but the difference is night and day. So after editing an image in the Develop module, hit the E key before scrolling to the next images if all you want to do is review.

Feb 05, 2024 | Categories: Photo technique, Tech, Tutorial | Comments Off on Lightroom Tip: Review and Select Photos in Library and NOT Develop mode