My coworker’s daughter wants to put all of the photos in her Pictures photo on her MacBook onto a USB (flash) drive. When she Gets Info on the Pictures folder it says it’s about 38 meg for about 200 small photos that she’d downloaded from her Photobucket. She plugged in a 2 gig flash drive, grabbed the Pictures folder, and dragged it to the new drive. It said there was not enough space. So she tried moving photos in groups of four or five. After a few iterations she said she got another out-of-space message.
She also said that when she Gets Info on an empty drive it says it’s half full. When she puts a full drive in and Gets Info, it says it’s half-full.
So what gives? Why can’t she put 38 meg of photos onto a 2 gig drive?
First of all, make sure she’s emptied the trash.
Secondly, is this a new Flash drive? There are LOADS of fakes, which are sold as 2GB or more, but only have a few hundred Meg of actual capacity. Where did she buy it?
Why would having things in the trash prevent her from moving things between folders?
She bought the drive at Staples.
Because, if there are items on the USB drive that are in the trash, they will use up space.
I forgot something in my first post - if there is nothing on the drive, have her reformat the drive using Disk Utility, and Mac OS Extended (case insensitive) format. Then see what happens.
I thought of reformating the drive, but I haven’t gotten round to getting one myself yet so I don’t know how to do that. Where does Disk Utility live?
Command + Shift + U
or Applications > Utilities
Thanks. I’ll pass the suggestions along. If you think of any more, I’ll pass those along as well.
Trash is more of a holding bin than a delete function. The files in the Trash can are still there and can be pulled out; when you copy, the files in Trash can get copied as well. If you empty Trash before doing copying, they won’t take up space.
(It’s not consistent - sometimes they copy over and sometimes they don’t. I’ve not bothered trying to figure out the pattern.)