Any way to reduce alias sizes?

Question

I noticed that the file size for my aliases were 1MB+ which is ridiculous. It is apparently a custom icon issue. So okay I've figured out that much. What I can't find is a way to fix it. Are there any tricks anyone knows for shrinking them?

Answer 1

Troy Pickett wrote:
Are there any tricks anyone knows for shrinking them?
Yes. Down to 6 KB in Mountain Lion.
The "bad" news: it's a multi-step process, and it requires at least one shareware (i.e. non-free) application to handle one part of the process.
The good news: it's possible to automate a major part of the shrinking down to a single Finder keyboard shortcut, plus one click on a button, plus a warning confirmation. (The latter part could be probably automated even more by using an AppleScript and a terminal command while also bypassing the "shareware software step", but I didn't look into it yet.)
In general, the following post sums up the issue quite well for an overview, although it doesn't really offer a workable solution: https://discussions.apple.com/message/6443819#6443819
The solution until Leopard (OS X 10.5) used to be a simple but effective Contextual Menu Item plugin:
http://www.splook.com/Software/Shrink_Alias.html
Snow Leopard and later dropped the support for Context Menu plugins in favor of Services, so the plugin won't work out of the box anymore.
Additionally, I think since Snow Leopard (or was it in Leopard already?), apart from including the icon in the resource fork, an Alias now also includes the same icon in the data fork, effectively doubling its size. Sigh.
And the Shrink Alias plugin wasn't ever updated to handle the data fork anyway.
But there's a workaround to make Shrink Alias – and other old Contextual Menu Items – run nonetheless.
Open your ~/Library folder. It's invisible by default, but you'll get there from the Finder "Go" menu while holding the Option key.
In your Library folder create a folder named "Contextual Menu Items".
Place the ShrinkAlias.plugin in there.
Download and install the free Shortcuts application from Abracode: http://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/shortcuts.html 
There's actually two of them in the download and you may want to install both. For running Shrink Alias you need Shortcuts32.
Read the Shortcuts instructions on their webpage carefully.
(I have also noticed that you may need to add background apps ShortcutObserver and ShortcutObserver32 to your Login Items manually since the corresponding Setup command doesn't stick sometimes.)
In the Shortcut32 "Menu" tab you should assign a global shortcut to actually invoke the context menu in Finder.
When you select an Alias in Finder and press your shortcut from step 6, you should now see a contextual menu with the Shrink Alias menu item. Selecting it will already reduce the Alias size by one half, by removing the icon data from the resource fork.
But there's still the data fork…
You need an application which can edit file forks.
I know of two shareware options:
• Path Finder – an extremely powerful file browser, many people are actually using it as a full Finder replacement.
• File Utility from Limit Point Software – a relatively easy to use "one trick pony".
Both apps support the OS X Services.
• You can either use Path Finder's "Show Info" global service to open its File Info window, where you need to activate the Attributes: Dates/Forks section and delete the Data Fork.
• Or you can use File Utility's Delete Data Fork service to invoke the app's interface for the selected item. (Note that you may want to disable all its other "Delete XY" services from the System Preferences in order to prevent file damage.)
Further automation is possible by assigning Services keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences, and by using a macro utility like Keyboard Maestro. As mentioned at the beginning, it should be even possible to automate everything using Applescript and Terminal commands and compile it e.g. as Service plugin using the OS X Automator. But that requires further investigation.