Question

I have a big project which has grown over the years and I have to clean up any images, which are no longer used.

If I delete an image from Xcode the image might still be referenced in a nib file, which makes tracking down the resources, which are no longer needed quite hard.

I currently open the whole project folder in TextMate as a project where I can search throughout all files. So I need to search file after file.

Is there a more efficient way to tackle this?

Answer 1

EDIT:

I just discovered Slender on the Mac App Store: LINK

That looks like the right tool for the job.

OLD ANSWER:

You could use a tool like opensnoop or dtrace (which opensnoop uses under the hood) to track the iOS simulator’s file access.

Read about opensnoop here.

Make sure you access all areas of your application with such a tool running to get full coverage and you will have a list of the files that are still in use.

You would need some command line fu to massage the output into a list that you can easily compare to the list of images in your project.

Depending on the size of your project this might be overkill, but since you say the project has evolved over several years it might be less error-prone, and more fun than manual searching.