13 Ways To Free Space On Your Mac

If you need to clear off space from your Mac's hard drive, there are some places you should look first. You may have some old iPhone backups, installers, or other downloaded files. You can easily see which apps and files take up the most space and get rid of things you no longer need. Applications store support files and caches in your Library folder, but they may not have been cleaned up when you uninstalled the app.

Comments: 15 Responses to “13 Ways To Free Space On Your Mac”

    Jonathan
    5 years ago

    Great video!! I have been looking in Pictures Directory and found a file called Photo Library Master.migratedphotolibrary showing date last modified as April 15. It is 67GB! can I safely delete this file? I do use the Photo app. which shows todays date as the last modified. was this when Apple went from iPhoto to Photo and left this all behind? Any help appreciated :-)

    5 years ago

    Jonathan: April 15? This year? When did you move from iPhoto to Photos? Apple introduced Photos many years ago. If that file is many years old, you can delete it. If not, it means you have been using iPhoto as well as Photos and you may have some data in one and not the other.

    Marcia Karon
    5 years ago

    This was exactly what I needed.

    Jonathan
    5 years ago

    Hi Gary, sorry. April 2015, so 4 years ago. My mistake. so good to delete then?

    TimA
    5 years ago

    Another folder I like to cleanup are the files that Mail accumulates as temporary items...
    ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads/

    5 years ago

    Jonathan: Should be. I archived my old iPhoto library before deleting it. Drive space is cheap, so why not?

    Darrell Coe
    5 years ago

    Great presentation for MacOS, would there be a Video on "Ways to Free Space On Your iPad"?

    5 years ago

    Darrell: For iOS it is pretty simple. Go to a Settings, General, iPhone/iPad Storage and go through your apps. Delete apps you don’t need. Clear out documents for other apps. Some apps, like Netflix and Audible have functions in the app to clear out docs you don’t need. Then look in the Files app for other documents to clear out. Yeah, maybe I will do a video on this.

    BarbaraJ
    5 years ago

    Fantastic video. My 2010 MacBook Air, was unbelievably slow - found com.apple.bird was 192gb. I unchecked iCloud Drive in preferences as I only use this Mac for email and internet. Now cache is less than 1gb and speed is much improved. Thank you.

    Ro
    5 years ago

    Once again thanks for the info. My MacBook Pro had no room for the recent update. It was my many podcasts. I intend to review your online course to see what I did wrong. Thank you.

    Lynda Farabee
    5 years ago

    Very interesting. Looking forward to getting it done!

    Robin
    5 years ago

    Hi Gary, You mention how to delete on iTunes your old backups from devices when you open it from finder are you able to drag and drop ones you want to keep before deleted the back up? This was very helpful never knew you could open the files that way on your Mac. I have a iMac and MacBook Pro, iPhone XS max and iPad Pro so yeah guess I love my apple products. I am sharing this with my son just graduated from college in IT couple weeks ago!

    Jacque
    5 years ago

    Thank you. Using your directions, I was able to increase free space from 90GB to 175GB on my 8 year old 320GB drive.

    Bruce Holland
    5 years ago

    Thanks Gary. Is it ok to delete all files in my download folder?

    5 years ago

    Bruce: If you don’t need them, sure. Look at them and decide if you need them anymore. For instance, if you downloaded PDF to read it, then are you done with it? Otherwise move it somewhere like your Documents folder.

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