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Is it possible to sort by kilobyte instead of MB in finder??

I'm trying to go through thousands of videos and pictures and I figured out a good way to find duplicates....


Sort by file size with the view thumbnail in finder...then you can see dupes really quickly...This works great for videos as most of the files size will be different. But when you work with images alot of the file sizes will be the same.


Is it possible to 'change' finder preferences to list by kilobyte instead of MB to get really granular with picture sorting?


I did not know if it was possible in OSX Mountain Lion (10.8.2) or via a 3rd party app?


Any help would be much appreciated...


Thanks!


MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 7, 2012 1:38 PM

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Posted on Nov 7, 2012 2:04 PM

In Finder's menu, click View > As List


That will show you size by kilobyte (for those files less that 1MB).


Further, you can click the "Size" button (near the top on the right), and that will sort the list by file size.

5 replies

Nov 7, 2012 7:06 PM in response to sberman

Thanks sberman....


But i was leaning more towards if say 100 pictures are listed as 1.4 MB but they could all be different if you could see the actual KB size in the finder sort (list by).


1,440,672 bytes (1.4 MB on disk) is what you see when you do command I on one file for example...


So you could have 100 at 1.4 MB but if you could show the bytes size instead you could get the dupes right beside each other.

Nov 7, 2012 7:25 PM in response to bwilson20

I'm not sure of a GUI solution, but you could use the Terminal.

When you open Terminal, it will be in your Home directory.

Type cd, leave a space, then drag the folder you are interested in onto the Terminal window. That will fill out the path to that folder. Hit return.

Now type this command and hit return:

ls -lSko

to sort descending, or

ls -lSrko

to sort ascending.

The size is the fifth column.

It's best to copy and paste those commands to get the letters correct. Those are lowercase ells.

That command is List (ls) and the options are list form, sort by Size, reverse sort, kilobytes, and don't show group.


If you have subfolders to go to from the first one, type cd and then the first few letters of the subfolder, then tab. It should fill out the foder name for you. If it doesn't, type a few more characters.


To go back up, type

cd ..

and hit return.


If you put the Terminal side-by-side with the Finder window, you can go back and forth finding and deleting from the GUI.

Is it possible to sort by kilobyte instead of MB in finder??

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