MacBook Air, by its physical nature, has less data storage capacity than its traditional HDD-utilizing brethren. While read/write speed is remarkably better, those professionals who own Airs or Pro Retinas and have enormous libraries of music, photos, and/or videos will discover they require external hard drives for their complete collections.
Then there are those of us who know that we don’t have thousands of large media files. Even the surest among us can, however, get choked in the storage department and I speak as the (usually) happy owner of a MacBook Air housing a meager 64GB SSD.
I’m never too surprised to have customers with the same machine come in with the same system warnings — that their startup disk is almost full. My latest Air check-in had this issue and, though her user directory clearly indicated the culprit was somewhere within, it was not in the obvious places: photos, music, and movies. Holding the option key, I clicked “Go” in the toolbar to access the Library directory (this user had 10.7) and discovered a large directory in Application Support called iLifeAssetManagement, taking up almost 20GB — quite a substantial amount on a 64GB drive.
Upon a quick foray into Google, I learned the iLifeAssetManagement directory is where OS X stores Photo Stream data; that is, if you’ve configured iCloud. See, if you’re manually adding photos to the iPhoto library from your iOS device (or using Aperture or even Image Capture), Photo Stream is going to be duplicating whatever you’re copying unless you’re super diligent about trimming what’s in there: most of us aren’t, and besides, Photo Stream is one of the most reliable and easy ways to cloud-back up your photos.
In most users’ cases, this situation won’t come up though it has come up enough for the lovely people at OS X Daily to write an article about it. The solution for a majority of Tech Tails readers is obvious: choose how you want to get your photos onto your Mac and just use that method. If you want to make sure to do this correctly, check out the OS X Daily article for detailed steps and screenshots.
A final word of advice: from time to time, investigate your startup disk and see what’s taking up space (highlight a directory and hold Command+I to Get Info) and, if you see something abnormally large, make it a learning opportunity.