Getting rid of those annoying ._ files
It all started so innocuously. All I was asked to do was put some photos onto a USB stick that could be played on a TV in my local pub. Easy. JPEGs duly loaded onto the drive, plugged in...and found to be incompatible. Weird. So I checked the JPEG file format against the specification. I changed sizes, I changed encoding type. Still not playing. Really annoying, and not a little embarrassing! Then I noticed - the TV was trying to display files with names starting with '._'. Where the hell did they come from? And the penny dropped. OSX creates all kinds of special files to work with non-HFS file systems - like the USB drive's FAT32 format. These files are part of the AppleDouble format , and don't show up if you reveal hidden files in OSX (see this excellent article on how to show/hide the hidden files ). So to get rid of them, you can either use a Windows or linux machine, or use the dot_clean command in OSX. Hopefully this will save someone some time tracking...