Apple loves coming out with “new” products giving them an “intuitive” interface and making everything for the slowest user. It’s like they have a great idea but end up implementing it in the stupidest way possible.

I have been having an issue where out of nowhere my startup disk became severely bloated. My computer slowed to a crawl and I hadn’t changed anything other than a software update. Not only was my startup disk full but when I went into “about this Mac” to figure out what type of files were eating up my disk space it said the entire drive was filled with “other”. I have a small 120gb SSD boot drive and 118GBs OF IT IS FILLED WITH OTHER!?!

Come on Apple. I have all of my media and crap on a separate drive for a reason. After hours of research and using a helpful utility called Disk Inventory X  I found out that if you use “photo stream” (Apple’s new cool way to store photos in the cloud and share your photos with everybody and their mother) it copies every file you share not only in the cloud but also to your boot drive in a hidden location. These files were eating up 30+ gigabytes of space on my OS drive. Like I said, I keep my media on a separate drive. All of my videos, render files, music and my Aperture library are on another drive. So why the hell would it save my Photo Stream to a hidden folder that can only be seen by going to Finder/Go/Connect to Folder… and typing ” ~/library/Application Support/iLifeMediaBrowser” Hmm?

Once I figured that out I turned off Photo Stream to delete the files properly. DO NOT DELETE THE FOLDER BY DRAGGING IT TO THE TRASH! It may freak out iPhoto or Aperture by restructuring hidden folders. Then when I looked in About This Mac/More Info/Storage the files were being analyzed properly and “other” was at a manageable 4GB.

I know I’m complaining about apple a lot in this, but seriously, this seems like an incredibly stupid way to handle files. Well, I hope this saves you a trip to the genius bar if you run into the same problem.

Comment below if you have any questions, and feel free to let me know if you are having a similar issue and this doesn’t solve it.