Mac OSX Desktop Ghost Files
A friend of mine tried to move her entire iphoto library (8,000+ images) to a new location on her computer. She did so by trying to copy all files to the desktop without putting them in a folder. The images were partly copied to the desktop, but could not be displayed for obvious reasons due to the number of files she was moving. The files never showed up on the desktop, but when you open the hard drive and click on the desktop in the left corner of the window, it shows there are over 8,000 files on her desktop that are all zero bytes, and will supposedly open in preview.app if opened. The files don't open, and when you try to delete them, they each say that the file is being used by another application. A bit of a pain to click 8,000 times to delete these files.
Have tried moving all of her actual photo files to a new location to clear the problem, along with a bunch of other little tweaks. Nothing has worked yet.
Have tried moving all of her actual photo files to a new location to clear the problem, along with a bunch of other little tweaks. Nothing has worked yet.
jhyiesla
You've probably already done this, but have you tried rebooting the Mac to see if that clears up the in use message?
ASKER
Yep, already restarted it. My friend keeps it on most of the time so I did that to try to clear any temp file cache.
Is iPhoto running on the Mac? If you open iPhoto do you see the extra set of pictures or picture placeholders? Have you tried booting in safe mode?
I assume that you have these pictures backed up somewhere just in case actually deleting these files whacks the originals...
I assume that you have these pictures backed up somewhere just in case actually deleting these files whacks the originals...
ASKER
iPhoto is running on the mac. Closing iphoto does not fix it, and moving the files out of the iphoto folders does not fix the problem either. I have not tried booting into safe mode yet. Will give that a try.
The photos are not backed up yet, but they soon will be.
The photos are not backed up yet, but they soon will be.
Have you tried trashing your finder prefs?
also/or
Have you tried holding down the option key when you select empty trash?
also/or
Have you tried holding down the option key when you select empty trash?
Boot into single user mode, mount the drive using the /sbin/mount -uw. Try to delete the files from there using rm. If they are all named similarly you could use rm -f *photonamexxx* or something along those lines.
Should have mentioned that to boot into single user mode, hold down command + s and then power up.
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