Posted on 2009-08-03

Disable Webpage Preview Images in Safari 4 Final

I’ve finally managed to switch off the final remnant of the Top Sites feature in Safari 4, the automatic generation of ‘Webpage Previews’

I’ve previously written about how to Reclaim Disk Space From Safari 4, where I detailed how to set up a job to cleanup the Webpage Previews cache folder.

Luckily, that exercise has now become obsolete, thanks to reports on several sites, which I can’t remember.

Below are listed the Terminal commands to verify disk use and apply the changes to Safari.

Verify size of folder

To make sure that our fix is in fact working, let’s measure the current size of the folder.

$ du -h ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews
248M    /Users/morgan/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews

Then let’s empty the folder

$ rm ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews/*

And let’s verify that the folder is indeed empty.

$ du -h ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews
0B    /Users/morgan/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews

Apply fix

Apply the following fix to disable generation of Webpage Preview images.

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

And don’t forget to restart Safari (so, I suggest you bookmark this page)

Verify fix

Browse around to your favorite websites for awhile, and then just re-run the command to measure disk use.

$ du -h ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews
0B    /Users/morgan/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews

The fix has been applied and tested with Safari 4.0.2 on OS X Leopard.

Please report successes and failures in the comments.