VMWare: Shrink image even though it’s a snapshot

I needed to shrink a vmware image to save space but it wasn’t possible because it wasn’t an independent disk but a snapshot (rhel3_ws_u4-000001.vmdk etc.) dependant upon the original disk (rhel3_ws_u4-s001.vmdk etc). The steps were: Join the snapshot and the parent disk into one: use the free VMWare Converter (see vmware.com) – perform transformation (import+export)