Why does finder and terminal report different file sizes for files and folders? Looking at a folder within Finder on macOS High Sierra, it is telling me that the size of the folder is 8.14GB, whereas running the command `du -hsx Pictures/` it is saying that the size of the folder is 7.6GB. Additionally, looking at the first couple of files in the folder, the size they are reporting in the Finder is different to what the output of `ls -lh | head` is saying. ![finder and terminal with different file size output]( For 001.JPG, Finder is saying 1.9MB whereas ll is saying 1.8M. For 002.JPG, Finder is saying 2MB whereas ll is saying 1.9M. For 003.JPG, Finder is saying 2.1MB whereas ll is saying 2.0M. For 004.JPG, Finder is saying 2MB whereas ll is saying 1.9M. For 005.JPG, Finder is saying 2MB whereas ll is saying 1.9M. and so on. Why is Finder and Terminal reporting different sizes for files?

This is because finder uses MB/GB rather than MiB/GiB. For any reasonable person a MB is 1024 KB which is 1024 B however some non-technical people decided this does not fit with base 10 scientific notation and they somehow convinced the rest of the world that a MB is 1000 KB which is 1000 B.

`ls` reports files in KiB, MiB, GiB, etc. Although there is no need to designate them as such because those things existing is pointless.

/end rant (°°

If we do some conversions though we can see that the sizes match up (or at least are close):


7.6GiB -> 8.16GB
1.8MiB -> 1.887MB
1.9MiB -> 1.992MB


Related: OS X Finder not showing correct file size - why and how “fix” it?