3/25/21
9:00 am

How To Manage iCloud Storage On a Mac

Here's how to see how much iCloud storage space you are using for files, photos, online backups and more. You'll find out how to clear out some space if you need it. You'll also learn how to purchase more storage, and even how to not have to pay every month.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to manage iCloud storage on your Mac.
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You have a limited amount of iCloud storage depending upon how much you pay for. How do you manage what's on there and know if you're getting close to your limit. Well, on the Mac you would go to System Preferences and then click on Apple ID at the top. Then look on the left for iCloud and click that. Now at the bottom you're going to see a little graph here that shows you how you're using iCloud storage. This is a demo account so I'm just using the free 5G. Here you could see little areas for Photos and Videos, Documents, Messages, Mail, and then the available space. But to get really detailed information click Manage. Now this is just going to give you an overview of the things that you have on iCloud. It's not going to give you the details you want but it's a good place to start. So here you can see very typical results where the top two items are Photos and Other Documents. After all both Photos and Documents are large files that take up a lot of space. So in this demo account I have 400 or so MB of Photos.Of course in my real account I have many GB of photos.
If I click here you don't really get much additional information. You get that there are a 180 photos and 3 videos stored. All I can do is turn it off. To really see the photos I have stored I would go to the Photos App. In here I could see at the bottom of All Photos it shows me the same thing. 180 photos and 3 videos and this is where I can figure out what I've got and if maybe there are things I can get rid of. I can look through and get rid of duplicates. I can go to Media types here, for instance, and see things like videos which are typically going to be a lot larger than photos and I can manage things. Now if say I wanted to clear some things off I could through Photos and delete photos. One of the things I like to do to save space on iCloud is to not store very many videos in my Photos Library. I like to leave my Photos Library as just photos and I like to put videos just as files on my hard drive perhaps not even in iCloud but stored locally or maybe in an external drive. 
Now back in System Preferences here Other Documents is telling you basically about the files that you have stored in iCloud Drive. You also have some other categories here below. For instance, I've got one here for Numbers, another for Keynote. These aren't really any different than Other Documents. But if you look in the Finder and you go to iCloud Drive you'll see you have a variety of folders here including your Documents folder which is probably where you have most of your stuff. But there are also special folders created for some apps like for Keynote. If I look in Keynote here I have a few files in that special folder. You may not use that folder for anything or you may use it to store all your Keynote files. It's really up to you. The same thing for Numbers. I have a bunch of Numbers files stored in here, this being a demo account. I find it easy to save little demo Numbers files into this folder. So now when I look here in System Preferences at say Numbers you could see it's 7.4 MB. That's equivalent to what's in this folder here. I have all of these files. If I do Command A to select all and then Command Option I to bring up the Inspector you could see 7.8 MB of files. So it's approximately the same amount just measured a little differently. However I know I have other Numbers files that are stored in iCloud Drive in Documents. That number would be a lot bigger if it was all Numbers files.
So in looking at what's in Other Documents mostly what you're going to see here should be the things that you've got inside your Documents folder in iCloud Drive. If you want to manage what's in there then naturally you would go into your Documents folder, look around, maybe archive some things you don't need, maybe delete some files that you don't need anymore, and manage these files just like regular files. Then getting rid of any of these would, of course, decrease the amount of iCloud storage you're using.
Now if you want to trim what documents you have in iCloud Drive in the Finder go to iCloud Drive either by clicking on it in the left Sidebar or using Go, iCloud Drive. Then here you'll see everything in iCloud Drive. Switch to List View and now you'll see Size here on the right. It's usually blank. But if you choose View, Show View Options or Command J, check Calculate All Sizes, you'll see Sizes now for each of those folders. Sort By Size by clicking there and now I can see my Documents folder takes up the bulk of that. I can expand the Documents folder and I can see what inside that takes up the most. So I can see my Examples file folder is the largest. I can go down to that and see, oh yeah, I've got a PhotoShop document that is taking up 38 MB of my 170 MB right there. So maybe that's something I don't need anymore. Maybe I can Archive that. You just basically use this List View and keep digging down into the different folders to see what you've got. It's pretty quick and easy to do and if you seem to be using a lot more space than you thought this is a really quick way to get to the bottom of it. Usually you'll see the files that are taking up the most space right away and you really get to understand a little bit better what files you've got and what's taking up space and come up with a strategy for maybe clearing some of that off. 
Now you're also going to see other apps listed here like iMovie, Health, Shortcuts, Other 3rd Party Apps, Reminders. These are all going to use some storage space to store their data. Typically these are going to be pretty small so you're not going to worry about these. Obviously, if you really wanted to trim the amount of data that Reminders was storing you would go into Reminders and delete old reminders or ones you don't use or maybe even attachments that you've added to Reminders. But in most cases if you're trying to cleanup your iCloud Storage you really wouldn't bother with these smaller apps. The further you get down this list the smaller the numbers get and the less effect cleaning up stuff in them is going to have. 
Now one thing I've got here is Messages. You may see Messages all the way up near the top. I only have 9 MB in here in this demo account. If I look in the Messages app you could see reason for those 9 MB is I've recently received a couple of photo attachments. Since in Messages, in Preferences under iMessage, I've got enable Messages in iCloud, it's using iCloud to sync my messages across all my devices. Which means these photos, and any other attachments, are stored inside of iCloud. So if you have a lot of photos then it's going to add up and Messages is going to take up a lot of space. There's no real good way to get rid of these. You can select anyone and hit Delete and it will delete one of these messages or the attachment. You can Control Click on it and select Delete as well to delete a message. If you click on the i button here at the top and then you scroll down you could see Photos and you could Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse, and delete a single photo or attachment. But there's no good way to delete lots of them. One thing you could do is in Messages, Preferences under General you can set Keep Messages instead of forever, to only 30 days or One Year. So older messages will automatically get deleted. I know some people like to keep their messages around forever though. 
But if you're using a lot of storage in Messages you may want to create a new habit for yourself. That's when you receive a photo or attachment from somebody after you view that message then maybe save it. You can see if I Control Click on it I can actually add to my Photos Library, for instance, or I can drag and drop this out to the Finder to Save it somewhere. Then delete it from Messages. It's not easy to do if you've got thousands of these going back into the past. But if you start it as a habit now not to let photos and attachments accumulate in the Messages app then you can really avoid having Messages just take up a lot of space in your iCloud Storage.
Another thing you may see here is Backups. Now for me it's all the way at the bottom because I don't have any stored for this particular account. But in my regular account I would see the Backup for my iPad and my iPhone here. This is the iCloud Backup but it's one of the most useful things that you could do with iCloud is to let it backup your iPhone and iPad. An iCloud Backup is so valuable if your iPhone is lost or stolen. You can get a new one and pickup right where you left off. So while you can select a backup here and use the minus button to delete it it's not a good place to cut corners. You should let your devices backup to iCloud because that's one of the best uses for iCloud Storage. 
Now if you're running out of storage space here you want to click Buy More Storage. This is where you go to Upgrade your account. I know a lot of people don't like to spend even $0.99 cents a month on a service but Macs are expensive computers. iPhones are expensive iPhones and iPads are expensive tablets. If you want to get the most out of them you really need to spend a little bit on iCloud Storage. Otherwise it's kind of like getting a nice car but then refusing to ever drive it on the highway. You're not getting the most out of it. Now I know a lot of people say they don't want to see aq $0.99 or $2.99 charge on my credit card bill every month. No, you don't need to do that. You can go into Media & Purchases and Manage your Account. It will go to the Mac App Store and in the area where you manage your account there is a section for Add Money to Your Account. You can add money to your Apple Account in increments here and it will deduct from that. So say you have the $2.99 plan and maybe every once in awhile you rent a movie or buy an app you can add $50 or $100 to your account an it will just keep pulling out of that. So it's kind of like having an annual plan but even better than that since it covers other Apple purchases as well. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 18 Responses to “How To Manage iCloud Storage On a Mac”

James Lowry

4 years ago

Would especially benefit from an ARCHIVE tutorial ...

(!!! Love Your Videos !!!)

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

James: Can you elaborate? What do you mean by "archive tutorial?"

nick

4 years ago

hi Gary, does the iCloud storage for Mail shown in Preferences tell me the amount of mail in my iCloud email account only or in all my email accounts? thx

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Nick: I can't see how how it would include anything outside of your iCloud email. Other accounts would be stored on other servers, not iCloud (like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc).

Craig

4 years ago

Hi Gary,
Can (or does) iCloud store iMovie projects in progress but not saved elsewhere?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Craig: Not usually. iMove libraries are usually put in the Movies folder, which is a local folder on your drive and not part of iCloud. The problem with moving them to an iCloud folder is iMovie projects are huge, as is anything where you are editing video files. So the network activity needed would be too much in most cases.

Justine

4 years ago

Hi Gary, you mentioned that if you didn't want a certain file you could "archive" it. What happens in that scenario? Is it saved at a greatly reduced size but is retrievable? Thanks! Always look forward to learning from you.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Justine: All I mean by that is you move it to someplace to save it for the long term. An example would be an external hard drive that you have purchased for that purpose. It is the same file, same size, just at a different location so it isn't using up space on your internal drive anymore since you don't really need the file.

Lali Raj

4 years ago

When I check the iCloud storage on my Mac it does it show all the devices I have with my Apple ID? If it is true, how to check for messages only on one device?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Lali: iCloud is one thing. One place. What you have in iCloud is shared by all of your devices.

Gene

4 years ago

Please correct me if I misunderstand: iCloud is a service that allows devices and apps to share data. The iCloud Drive is a cloud service where I can store whatever I want. We subscribe and have 200Gb. I thought that I was getting 200Gb on my iCloud Drive account? I guess I don't understand the relationship between iCloud and iCloud Drive. Please help. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Gene: Yes, you have 200GB on your iCloud Drive account if that is what you are paying for. Not sure what you are asking. Maybe check out https://macmost.com/understanding-icloud-drive-and-the-optimize-mac-storage-option.html

PTR

4 years ago

If you delete the "conversation" between you and another person, do all the photos in that conversation get deleted too? Would this be a better option than trying to delete a lot of individual photos?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

PTR: They should, yes. That is an option only if you want to delete the conversation text too.

Jim Haynes

4 years ago

You say,"I have Optimize Mac Storage turned OFF. That means that every file on my iCloud Drive is also on my Mac Pro.” I have Optimize Mac Storage turned ON on both my iMac and my MacBook Air. So every file on my iCloud Drive is also on my iMac. Both are synced together. I can pickup my MacBook Air and travel and have all my files with me that are on my iMac. I had a conversation with an Apple senior advisor and he confirmed that I should have Optimize ON.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Jim: Nope. If you have Optimize ON, then things are optimized. Only files that you have room for on your Mac will be on your Mac. They will all appear there, but larger files will be downloaded on demand when you open them, IF you have an Internet connection. See https://macmost.com/understanding-icloud-drive-and-the-optimize-mac-storage-option.html

John Ullis

4 years ago

I want to delete photos on my iPhone but still want then on iCloud. Does it work that way?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

John: No, you can't do that. The whole point of the cloud is to have all of your stuff everywhere. If your goal is to simply save space on your iPhone, turn on the "Optimize" feature. That is exactly what it is for.

Comments Closed.

How To Manage iCloud Storage On a Mac

Comments: 18 Responses to “How To Manage iCloud Storage On a Mac”

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