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.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can free up space on your Mac.
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So say your Mac is giving you warnings that its drive is almost full. Or maybe you notice that it's 90% full or more and you think it might be affecting performance. Or maybe you just want to tidy things up a bit. There are several likely suspects of places on your Mac where you can easily clean things off and free up space. Now a lot of people will tell you that you need to buy and install a special app or something to cleanup your Mac. You don't. You don't need anything to be able to cleanup your Mac. You just need to know where to look. But a lot of times people will show you things that you can cleanup that really don't save you that much space or will immediately fill up again. So there's a lot of bad advice out there.
Now let's start by looking at iTunes. iTunes, of course, is used to store music, movies, and other things. But it's also used to backup your iOS devices. There could be some old backups in there that you don't need anymore that take-up a considerable amount of space. Go to iTunes Preferences and then click on Devices. Now you'll find a lot of people advising you to look for these things but they don't tell you to look here. This is where you should be looking because this is the proper place to delete them.
Here I actually see, in this test user account I'm using, a whole bunch of old backups. You can see these are from 2016. They're definitely old and I definitely don't need them anymore. These aren't even my current devices. So if I select here if I want to see how big it is I can Control click on it and it will say Show In Finder. This will bring up the finder window that shows me where these are. You can see in the folder here called Backup there are three folders corresponding to these three backups. I can select one and do Command i and it will calculate the size for me. I can see this one's small 8.2 megs. This one is almost 27 gigs. So I can easily delete these by selecting on here and hitting Delete Backup. That will clear up all that space. It's very common to find old devices listed here and you can clear it out.
Now if you find a current device there and you find out that's big as well there's something you can do. You can actually reduce the amount of storage on your iPhone or iPad and that will help your Mac. For instance if in an app, say, Netflix you have a whole bunch of downloaded movies or in Audible you have thirty downloaded books. If you clear that data out it will reduce the size of your backup. So then you could do another backup to your Mac and find out the sizes of these go down. So the less stuff you store as app data on your iOS device the smaller your backup will be to your Mac.
Now before we leave iTunes let's look at another place. We can look here at movies. and we can see what movies we've got. We can clear those off. A lot times people have movies here that they've already watched. They don't need them anymore. You can simply Control click on it and say Delete from Library. If you have purchased movies here then you'll see a cloud icon meaning that the movie isn't currently on your drive but you can stream it or download it anytime you want. You can Control click on it and then choose to remove it from your drive, saving all that space. But you could always stream it or download it again. Also remember to do the same for TV shows.
Another place that you may have things you don't need anymore is in your Downloads folder. You can find your Downloads folder in lots of places. A lot of times in your Dock. You can also find it in your Finder sidebar. But you can always open up a new Finder window and do Go, Downloads to go to that folder. A lot of time people leave things here and it takes up a lot of space. For instance you may download an installer for an app, install the app, uninstall the app, but the installer is still in your Downloads folder.
Another place that files accumulate is the Trash. People sometimes throw files into the Trash but never actually empty the trash. You can open your Trash folder there form the Dock, hit Empty. Look in the Finder and you can use Empty Trash. In Finder, Preferences, if you want under Advanced there is an option to Remove Items from the trash after thirty days. So it will prevent things from accumulating there.
As you would expect a place for large files is your Applications folder. So in a new Finder window you can go to the Applications folder many different ways. Then you can go to List View, Click on Size to sort by size, and then you want to go to View, Show View Options or Command J, and turn on Calculate All Sizes. So that will calculate all the sizes of everything there, even Folders. So now sorted by size you can see which applications take up the most space. You want to look here for applications you're no longer really using. For instance I have one here that takes up the most space. Maybe if I'm a developer I just downloaded it out of curiosity. I may now want to delete it. I never use PowerPoint for instance. Maybe I should get rid of that. 
If you want to delete something make sure you delete it the right way by going to Launchpad, clicking on the apps till they jiggle, and then using the X button to actually remove them. If you can't do it that way then look for an official uninstaller for the app from wherever you downloaded it from.
So your Photos Library is another place that can be taking up a lot of space. Now one of the things people say is to move your Photos library to an external drive. That's fine if you're on a desktop Mac. But a lot of time that really doesn't work unless you're going to bring that external drive with you everywhere you go. One thing I like to do to save space is not have my videos in the Photos Library. I like to store them separately. So you could put just your videos on an external drive just as files in the Finder to see how much space your videos are taking up. You can go to Media Types, go to Videos, and then do Command i to get information. You'll see exactly how much space it's using. So in this case it's just a sample library and it's taking up a little over a gig.
So if I decide I want to offload those I may want to drag and drop them into a folder in the Finder. Then remove them from my Photos Library. This will not only save me space on my hard drive it could also save me a lot of space in iCloud. Also in thinking about Photos you may want to go and check and see if you have an old photo library around. So in the Finder go to the Pictures folder here. You may only see one thing in here which is your Photos Library. But you may also see an older photo library. Even an iPhoto library if you've had your Mac for awhile. So you may want to archive that. Get that off your drive and then save all that space.
Now back in the Photos App one way you can save space without much work is go to Photos Preferences, and assuming you're using iCloud Photo Library already, if you turn on Optimize Mac Storage what will happen is all your photos will be in iCloud but not all of them will be on your Mac. Only Thumbnails and they will load automatically when you need to see those photos. Now turning that on will not quickly save you space. You won't see the difference right away. But slowly over time, over days and weeks, things will be optimized and your Photo Library will take up less space on your hard drive even though everything you've got is still in iCloud.
The same thing goes if you're using iCloud Drive. If you go into iCloud in System Preferences and you go to iCloud Drive Options you'll see Optimize Mac Storage there. If you turn that on the same thing happens with your documents. Everything will be in iCloud but only the most recent files and the most commonly accessed files will be on your Mac. You won't see a change right away but over time space will be cleared up as things you haven't used in a long time are just stored in iCloud and no longer on your hard drive until you need them.
Alright, so let's look at some more specific places that you can find some things. In the Finder choose Go and then hold the Option key down. That brings up the Library here. It only appears if you have the Option key down. I want you to look for iTunes and then look for iPhone Software Updates. Now I've got nothing in there. But if you see something in there you may have some old software updates that were downloaded to your Mac and then used to update your iPhone or iPad and didn't go away for some reason. They're still hanging around. You can Delete those. So look at iPhone and you may also see one there for iPad. A separate folder.
Also under Library look for Application Support. So I'm going to switch to List View and I'm going to sort by size and do the same thing I did before with Show View Options and turn on Calculate All Sizes. Now I'll see what's taking up a lot of space. You may see Mobile Sync there. That's where those device backups were that we looked at in iTunes before. But you may see some other things as well. So you can look through these. In general you don't necessarily want to get rid of anything unless you know what it is. But you may spy some apps listed here that you no longer use. You can uninstall the app. If you see that then you can feel free to get rid of it.
Now we go back up to the Library folder and here we can look at caches. We can see caches also in List View, Sort By Size, and turn on Calculate All Sizes to see which caches are big. Now this is where you'll get some bad advice because sometimes you'll be told, oh you've got to delete your browser cache or your cache for this app or the cache for that app. But caches are there to speed things up. If you use the app often caches are just going to fill back up. If it's going to take a gig of space then you can clear it out now but fifteen minutes from now if you use that app it's going to be a gig of space again. So don't necessarily jump into doing things like clearing out your Safari cache at all.
Instead what you want to look for are apps that you no longer use because you may have deleted an app and then find that there are still some cache files here. For instance here's an old version of the screen recording app I use and it's got 1.6 gigs of cache. It's never going to clear that out because I'm never going to run that old version again. I don't even have it installed.  So I can feel free to clear that out.
So what about if the problem is that you simply have some large files from large documents. Things that you created but you don't need them any more. Well a quick way to find out if you have any real large files that are hanging around is to go to your Home folder. So you see everything that you've got. Your Documents, your Desktop, things like that. Then you can do a Search. I'm going to do Command F to search. I'm not going to use the box here. I'm going to search by file size and Is Greater Than and set it to 100 MB. So here I see a few iMovie libraries and things like that. But I may find some other big files here. Some videos I've stored and things that I just don't need anymore.
That's still no substitute for going to your Documents or Desktop folder and looking through all of your folders and finding what you've got. Because you may have some folders that have some small files but lots of them and you just don't need them anymore. There really is no substitute. There's no app that's going to make this quicker for you for going through your documents and doing a spring cleaning every once in awhile. Get rid of things that you don't need. You can archive them easily. Get yourself an external drive and archive things off that you don't need anymore to clear out space. The side benefit is that you can organize things a little better while you do it.
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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 :-)

Gary Rosenzweig

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

This was exactly what I needed.

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

TimA

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

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

Darrell Coe

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

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

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.

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

Very interesting. Looking forward to getting it done!

Robin

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

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

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

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.

Comments Closed.

13 Ways To Free Space On Your Mac

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

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