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I've been batch converting .tiff files to make them .gifs using Photoshop Elements and the resulting gifs are reported by Finder as being 64K files. Yet, if I open one in preview.app and do a get info, it says 5k.

Also, if I do file listing of the folder where these gifs images are within the ftp software Transmit, it reports the files as being 5k each as well.

A bash term using 'ls -al' also reports the files are 5k.

So what's wrong with the Finder ? Why isn't it reporting the right file sizes?

(OS X 10.3.2, iBook G4 933Mhz)

Sounds like you're using the HFS and not HFS+. I thought X would only run on HFS+. Not sure about this.

Anyway, what this means is the file is only 5 KB in size, but the disk is partitioned into 64 KB chunks. Meaning you can use any combination of these 64 KB chunks to hold your data. If your file was 128 KB in size, it would fit perfectly into two chunks. One of benefits of using the HFS+ file system is that is uses 4 KB chunks. So your 5 KB file would only consume 2 of these chunks. Doesn't sound very useless, but if you imagine having millions of these small files, you'll save quite a bit of space.

I mentioned above that I was using 10.2.3. The hard disk is factory formatted by Apple and disk utility says its 'mac os extended'. Is that not hfs+?

Oh wait, an 'info' on the drive partition from drive utility says, 'Apple_HFS'. Does that mean it's not +'ed?

You are right, Mac OS Extended is HFS+.

The files may have resource forks for icon previews (which Photoshop includes by default), Preview and Transmit may only be reporting the data fork size and ignoring the resource fork. I can understand why Transmit would ignore it because you can't FTP resource forks. If Preview is ignoring them too, then that is just silly.

Oh right, the ol resource forks. Elements is a carbon app so I suppose it would HAVE to remain 9/resource friendly.

Yup, you're using HFS+, also called Mac OS Extended.

I did a little test on my own. I've got a JPG, while the Finder reports as using 236 KB of disk space, and 234,607 bytes of actual space (230 KB approx.) Doing an info in Preview reports the size as 172 KB.

If the hard disk came from apple with os x on it, it should be HFS+.

What's probably happening is the Finder is including the resource fork's size in the total file size. Photoshop, for example, places a preview of the image file in the resource fork.

Both preview.app and transmit would only give you the size of the data fork, since that's all they're really concerned with, and the unix tools don't really understand what a resource fork is and only work with the data forks. For example, if you copy a file using cp in terminal, the copied file will have no resource fork.

I think that's what's going on here. Try copying the files in terminal to someplace else and see if the reported file size goes down.

BINGO! That cleared it up and I now understand fully. Thanks mate!