Hey, Do you have Safari 4? Do you want to see a screenshot of every webpage you've visited with it?

[onehandle]

That's every webPAGE, not site. And that's a jpeg screenshot of each and every one.

You heard me.

Go here on your Mac: user>Library>Caches>com.apple.Safari>Webpage Previews

My preview folder contains at this moment 3,499 screenshots of pages I have visited since September 4th (the day my new MacBook Pro arrived from China), adding up to 580.7MB of space taken up on my 500GB hard drive.

This is apparently associated with "Top Sites" for its preview function.

Now I assume that clearing my cache will clean out these files, but I am fascinated by the click by click history of my Internet usage being carefully captured by my Mac. I also assume that in Safari preferences, if I drop the 'Remove history items' to fewer days, that eventually the screenshots will start being deleted, but I'm not sure.

I read in the Apple forums that you can delete these screenshots, then highlight the 'Webpage Previews' folder and get info in the finder, then make the folder 'Read Only' and this recording of screenshots will cease. No report of instability afterwards in the posts, but tinkerer beware.

Very interesting.

Like I said, I'm leaving mine recording, because I have the space and am somewhat fascinated.

[realisticphish]

1. wow

i just checked mine, and I have about 300 megs taken up (I use Camino for most of my browsing)

It's not a lot, but I can see it adding up VERY quickly

[comtec]

2. Wow that's kind of fucked up

I'll have to see if the windows version does this as well.
a cache is one thing - rebuilding the websites by inference, but this... :scared:
At what point did apple truly become big-brother?
and how fortunate that they are not the majority OS?
Im sorry but this is really fucked up!

[FreeState]

3. Its a cache

You can disable the feature or turn private browsing on if you dont want it to make screen shots. In addition you can tell your browser to delete caches as often as you would like (meaning after a session, daily, weekly etc).

FYI any web-cache saves all the images and html neeed to re-construct the page - this is just a picture of those files that all browsers save.

I for one love this feature.