Visually Managing Your Data With DaisyDisk

Here’s my system drive showing where most of my largest files are – my Home folder.

One of the challenges of digital photography and computers in general is storage – you never seem to have enough of it. Applications are getting bigger, photo and video files take up huge amounts of space, and we’re generating more and more digital content regularly. Keeping track of it all, and deciding what we need versus what we can get rid of can be difficult, but is crucial to keep your computer running efficiently. For example, you should never let your system drive fill up to 75% capacity or higher because this will impact performance and slow down data access making your computer feel sluggish.

A great way to keep tabs on all of the “stuff” on your drives is via a great new app I discovered called DaisyDisk. This app has a beautiful interface that graphically displays all of the data on a hard drive in an interactive map. Then you can easily spot unusually large files and remove them to recover space. The color coded map gives you an overview of your data, so you always know what your hard disks are filled with.

My MacBook Pro laptop with attached drives

I’ve used it on my system drive, as well as my data drives where I keep my RAW files and video files. I’ve been able to find really large files that were perhaps left over from an old project, as well as duplicate files that I didn’t need. I love the visual approach to seeing what is on your hard drives.

One of my Lightroom Library drives showing sizes of my RAW archives per year.

This app is available on the App Store as well as directly from the developer’s website, and I highly recommend it for those who need to manage large amounts of storage, like photographers!

Unfortunately there is not a Windows version, but there is an alternative called Scanner, however I have no experience with it.