02-06-2008, 02:23 PM

Hi,

Over the last few months I've been doing some editing in photoshop with some pictures, saving them, and then using a windows program on my PC to resize them and compress them further to a good file size. When I do this, I notice that everytime I edit a image file on my Mac, it always creates a duplicate hidden file on my PC that has the exact same image name, but is pre-fixed with ._.

So, if I had a image named image01.jpg, there would be image01.jpg and a ._image01.jpg hidden file. This is quite annoying, because this second hidden file seems to raise the image file size on the mac (I need my images to be good quality, but as small file size as possible).

I have been just deleting the prefixed files, but now our office has switched to 100% Macs, and I don't have the ability to access a PC anymore to delete these files.

Does anyone know what these files are, why they are generated, and how to stop them from being generated, or a way to delete them on the Mac once they are generated?

I'm using the new iMac with 10.5.1.

Thanks for the help anyone can provide...this has been racking my brains all morning.

Also one more quick question, can anyone recommend a good jpeg image compressor? I was using one on the PC, but since we got rid of them I can't use it anymore.

02-06-2008, 02:30 PM

What file format?

02-06-2008, 02:50 PM

They are not duplicates of your files

mac saves some information in the file, like a PC, but has an extra part of the file called the resource fork

Those extra files represent the extra resource fork info that the PC drive cannot save within the file itself, so the info is saved as an extra file

The only way to truly delete hem is to format that drive as HFS (mac) or maybe FAT 32