If you want to force git to show binary files diff as a plain text diff use --text option like so:

git diff --text

diff <(git grep -Ic '') <(git grep -c '') | grep '^>' | cut -d : -f 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 2-

Breaking it down:

• git grep -c '' prints the names and line counts of each file in the repository. Adding the -I option makes the command ignore binary files.
• diff <(cmd1) <(cmd2) uses process substitution to provide diff with named pipes through which the output of cmd1 and cmd2 are sent.
• The grep and cut commands are used to extract the filenames from the output of diff.

Out of the box, git can easily add binary files to its index, and also store them in an efficient way unless you do frequent updates on large uncompressable files.

The problems begin when git needs to generate diffs and merges: git cannot generate meaningful diffs, or merge binary files in any way that could make sense. So all merges, rebases or cherrypicks involving a change to a binary file will involve you making a manual conflict resolution on that binary file.

You need to decide whether the binary file changes are rare enough that you can live with the extra manual work they cause in the normal git workflow involving merges, rebases, cherrypicks.

.gitignore will prevent untracked files from being added (without an add -f) to the set of files tracked by Git. However, Git will continue to track any files that are already being tracked.

To stop tracking a file, we must remove it from the index:

git rm --cached <file>

To remove a folder and all files in the folder recursively:

git rm -r --cached <folder>

The removal of the file from the head revision will happen on the next commit.

WARNING: While this will not remove the physical file from your local machine, it will remove the files from other developers' machines on their next git pull.

tldr;

git log --all --numstat \
    | grep '^-' \
    | cut -f3 \
    | gsed -r 's|(.*)\{(.*) => (.*)\}(.*)|\1\2\4\n\1\3\4|g' \
    | sort -u

Explanation:

The git-log option --numstat

shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.

Source: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log, emphasis mine

This produces output entries like the following:

commit 0123456789012345678901234567890123456789
Author: Joe Example <jexample@domain.com>
Date:   Thu Mar 9 15:33:29 2017 +0000

    edit Dockerfile, add assets/foobar.jpg

1   1   Dockerfile
-   -   assets/foobar.jpg

The grep '^-' matches lines with a leading hyphen, the cut -f3 prints the third tab-delimited field, and the

sed -r 's|(.*)\{(.*) => (.*)\}(.*)|\1\2\4\n\1\3\4|g'

detects files that have been moved/renamed and prints both the source and destination; e.g., it would change this:

path/to/{foo => bar}/my-document.pdf

to this:

path/to/foo/my-document.pdf
path/to/bar/my-document.pdf

Finally, the sort -u will accumulate, sort, and uniquify the list of paths.

EDIT: You need gnu-sed installed because the default sed does not have the -r option. Best to install via Brew: brew install gnu-sed

I think git-annex does exactly what you need: http://git-annex.branchable.com/