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finding files (.jpg)

I need an app (maybe) to locate .jpg files on my MacBook Pro. Storage shows that I have 108 GBs of “pictures” on my Mac, yet my Photos app uses an external hard drive for storing pix. The Pictures folder in the root for me has only 354MBs. That means that I have a lot of .jpg files in various folders on my internal hard drive. Whew. What is the best method to find and move them? Thanks.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Jun 17, 2023 10:03 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 18, 2023 5:20 AM

See if you still have the following in your Pictures folder (despite having that external Photos library):


  • Photos Library
  • iPhoto Library
  • Photo Booth Library


In your Finder Preferences > Advanced panel, have this set:



And in the Finder View menu, select Show Path Bar.


And if you have set System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results to index images, you can do the following case-insensitive search from a new Finder Window search field once you have clicked on your home directory in the Favorites sidebar:

kind:image +.(jpg jpeg)



The Finder window will then change to two tabs: you quoted user name, and This Mac. Those shown for your user name will be images you can likely remove, and those for This Mac may be images (used by the operating system) and not those that you can just remove. Clicking any image will display its path at the bottom of the Finder window.

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4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 18, 2023 5:20 AM in response to Paul Korntheuer

See if you still have the following in your Pictures folder (despite having that external Photos library):


  • Photos Library
  • iPhoto Library
  • Photo Booth Library


In your Finder Preferences > Advanced panel, have this set:



And in the Finder View menu, select Show Path Bar.


And if you have set System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results to index images, you can do the following case-insensitive search from a new Finder Window search field once you have clicked on your home directory in the Favorites sidebar:

kind:image +.(jpg jpeg)



The Finder window will then change to two tabs: you quoted user name, and This Mac. Those shown for your user name will be images you can likely remove, and those for This Mac may be images (used by the operating system) and not those that you can just remove. Clicking any image will display its path at the bottom of the Finder window.

Jun 19, 2023 11:12 AM in response to VikingOSX

Although my example works for those jpg and jpeg image extensions, the natural intuition is to add more image types in the parenthesis (e.g. jp2), or entirely different ones, and that oddly does not work. And on Ventura, Spotlight doesn't even recognize .svg artwork as images, but as kind "MyDocumentType" which is really non-intuitive. One would need to perform a raw query for kMDItemContentType:svg to find them.


To find other image types (using a FInder Window search field) one can do this:

kind:image (name:.png OR name:.tif)


finding files (.jpg)

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