[Gavin]

How can I turn off Webpage Previews caching in Safari?

This thing is caching up to 3 GBs of web page preview images in a day, eating up what little space I have left

I've turned off everything I can find related to Top Sites but it's still caching the images

check out
/Users/you/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews/

to see how much crap it's storing

[chabig]

I don't know. But did you realize hare drives are realliy cheap see days?

[Thorzdad]

Gavin, have you enabled the Develop menu in Safari? If not, you need to do so. Go to Safari>Preferences>Advanced and check the "Show Develop menu in menu bar" box.
Then, go to the Develop drop-down in the Safari menu bar and select "Disable Caches." This should stop Safari from caching the webpage previews...and everything else. Unfortunately, I think Apple makes this an all-or-nothing proposition when it comes to caching in Safari.

[Cold Warrior]

I think it is the Top Sites feature that generates these huge page previews.

There's a possible solution here towards the end of the thread.
Apple - Support - Discussions - Disable Safari 5 Top Sites feature ...

You could also try the suggestion mentioned in post 3 here.

Edit: If you are fighting over 3GB space because it's nearly all you have left, it's time for a larger HDD. OS X is going to get weird on you if you try to use it with too little free space.

[Gavin]

Thanks guys - defaults option is the kind of thing I'm looking for.

A bigger drive is just sweeping the problem under the rug; when you turn off a feature and it still eats 3 - 4 GB in under 2 hours, that's a bug. Kind of like when you cancel a service but they still charge your credit card every month.