A bug has been found in Apple's macOS Image Capture app that unnecessarily takes up potential gigabytes of storage when transferring photos from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac.
The developers of media asset management app NeoFinder spotted the issue and shared in a blog post that the issue occurred during the process of converting HEIF photos taken on iOS to more standard JPG files with Apple's Mac tool.
This process happens when the user unticks the "Keep original" option in Image Capture's settings, which converts the HEIC file to JPG when copied to a Mac.
However, in the process, the app also inexplicably adds 1.5MB of empty data to each file.
The NeoFinder team says, of course, that's a huge waste of space, especially considering that some Macs have internal SSDs as small as 128GB. such a small disk is quickly filled with empty data that is completely wasted. With just 1000 photos, for example, this bug eats up 1.5GB of valuable and very expensive SSD disk space.
NeoFinder's developers say they discovered the bug purely by accident while using the hex editor to improve NeoFinder's metadata capabilities, and have provided an example screenshot showing what a single JPG file looks like at the end of the hex data after transfer.
It's worth noting that this error only occurs when transferring photos from an Apple device, not when importing photos from a digital camera using Image Capture.
The team at NeoFinder says it has notified Apple of the bug, and the developers suggest that anyone bothered by the issue can try a new beta version of third-party tool Graphic Converter, which includes an option to remove unwanted empty data from JPEG files.
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