Save Space On Your Mac By Temporarily Uninstalling Apps

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can save a lot of space on your Mac by not having all of your apps installed all of the time. 

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Now if you're short of space on your Mac's drive you may be looking for ways to get some of that space back. Some of the biggest files on your Mac are going to be applications. But here's the thing. You don't need to have all of your applications installed all of the time. You probably have some applications you use all the time. Others that you could be using any day. But there are probably some that you rarely use. Well, just because you purchased that app and have installed it doesn't mean you can't uninstall it. You could always reinstall it later. In almost all cases it's easy to reinstall software that you already have purchased. Years ago this wasn't necessarily true. It took a long time to install apps from disks or from CD's or if you purchased something online trying to reinstall it from wherever you bought it from was difficult. But in most cases you're getting your apps from The Mac App Store. Even if you're not you're probably downloading them from other sites. You can easily redownload an app. 

So, for instance, let's take a look and see how much space is being used by applications on my Mac here. I'm going to go to About This Mac and then Storage. Then Manage. Then I'm going to click on Applications here. Then I can sort by size and see the largest first and see the apps that are taking up the most space. I can start going through them and figuring out what it is that I don't really need to use all the time. In fact, when you select an app you've got the ability right here to uninstall it. No, this won't clean up all the little bits. It might add to the library. But it will get rid of the bulk of the app. It will leave preference files, really tiny files behind, so when you reinstall the app you can pick it up right where you left off. 

Now let's go into The App Store here. Then let's take a look inside of the account by clicking down here. You should be able to see all of your purchased apps. Of course this is my demo account so it's pretty small. My real account has pages and pages of apps. Notice that if an app isn't installed, like this one, it has a little cloud icon. I can click right here to reinstall it. If an app is already installed then it usually has an Open button. So as an example let's get right of this app right here. I'm going to go into Launchpad and search for it. Then I'm going to click and hold and then click the X. I could have deleted it using the Storage Manager like I showed before. So let's delete that. So now the app is no longer on my Mac. But if I return to The App Store I see that I could easily redownload it here. I'll just click there and it's going to get the most recent version from The App Store and reinstall it. You can do it so easily because I'm logged in here to my account. It knows i purchased this app using this account and I have the right to download it. I don't get charged again or anything like that. 

This works whether the app is free or it costs something. It's also good to remember any in-app purchases that you made. So if you needed in-app purchased to upgrade the app it's going to know because you're using the same Apple ID that you made those purchases and you can access those parts of the app as well.

Now in other cases you may be installing the app from a different system than the Mac App Store. So, for instance, here these Adobe apps I'm installing using Adobe Creative Cloud. Actually the Creative Cloud interface makes it very easy to uninstall and reinstall apps. So if I find that I rarely use PhotoShop, maybe a few times a year, I can uninstall it and get back all that space and the next time I need it I can reinstall it. Other apps like this game come from different systems and you may find that you can just as easily reinstall there. For instance go into things like Steam, for instance, for games allows you to just redownload anything you purchased. You don't need to keep the games installed after you're done playing them thinking that you may want to get back to them in a couple years. 

Still other apps, like this one, you may install from a website. Downloading it and installing it from there. But in those cases you can just redownload and reinstall them again. Most apps today have you log into the site and you can authenticate yourself that way and it could show that you purchased that app and you could redownload it. Other times you could always download the app free and you simply log into your account inside the app once you've got it installed. 

So in close to 100% of the situations today you can reinstall apps that you have previously purchased no matter where you've gotten them from. So the next time you need to clear out some space maybe look at your applications. Even if they're valuable applications that you've spent a lot of money on consider uninstalling them knowing you can easily reinstall them later on should you need them.