How To: Shrink DMG Files On A Mac
This was giving me a problem some days ago so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial on how to shrink dmg files on a mac. Why would you want to do this ? Well lets say you are creating an application and you want to package it in a DMG so you open up Disk Utility and create a blank image. Well you can only choose certain sizes. Most of us would choose a 40MB image so we have plenty of initial space to work with.
As far as I know there are 2 methods for shrinking the dmg down to the size of its contents, they are listed below.
Method – 1:
- Right Click on the DMG
- Click Compress
This will generate a zip file down to the actual size of the content of the DMG since free space has 100% compression ratio.
Method – 2:
This method involves the use of the Terminal App which can be found under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
- Launch Terminal
- Type the following hdiutil resize -size 10M /Path/To/DMG/DMG_Name.dmg
Code Breakdown:
- hdiutil – A utility that comes preinstalled with Mac OS X, that manipulates disk images, etc…
- -size – An argument passed to hdiutil, indicating that you want to change the size of an image.
- 10M – means I am changing the dmg size to 10 Megabytes, insert your own value here.
- The rest should be self explanitory
So there you have it, 2 methods to resize your dmg in Mac OS X. Thanks for reading.
If anyone would benefit from having a little GUI App that resizes DMG’s let me know, if I receive enough requests, I might make one and post it here.
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