A strange bug uncovered in macOS can fill up your storage drives with a whole bunch of empty data. The issue is found inside the Image Capture app and surfaces when transferring HEIF photos from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac.
Almost all of Apple’s machines now ship with solid-state drives as standard. They’re significantly faster than traditional spinning hard disks, but they’re also substantially more expensive (though costs are coming down).
That means you tend to get less storage per dollar than you did when HDDs were king. Many of the Apple notebooks in use today, for instance, have 128GB drives. There was a time when the MacBook Air shipped with a 64GB SSD.
This makes a newly-discovered bug in the Image Capture app a real concern for most Mac users.
macOS Image Capture bug eats up free storage
The problem occurs when you transfer images from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac using Image Capture and select the option to convert those images from HEIC (now the default image file format on iOS) to a more common JPG.
In addition to converting your files as expected, macOS also adds 1.5MB of “totally empty data to every single photo file it creates,” NeoFinder Blog explained. “Of course, this is a colossal waste of space.”
If you happen to transfer 1,000 photos, for instance, an additional 1.5GB of space is eaten up for no apparent reason. It gets filled with nothing, and it seems the only way to recover it is to delete the images you transferred.
Image Capture filled with bugs
This isn’t the first Image Capture bug that has surfaced in a recent version of macOS. NeoFinder says issues have been present “in every single release since Mac OS X 10.10,” and with every fix Apple makes, a new problem is introduced.
The most recent bug was discovered “by pure chance” while NeoFinder was working in a hex editor to examine metadata capabilities. Chances are the bug has eaten up space for a lot of Mac users who have no idea what’s going on.
There may be a workaround to prevent this issue, however. If you check the “Keep Originals” option in Image Capture, then your images should be transferred without additional data being added.
Apple has been notified of this bug, so we should see a fix in a future macOS release. In the meantime, though, you’ll want to keep an eye on how much storage is being eaten up after using the Image Capture app.
