Back in the days when Macs had hard drives nosotros all had tons of space on our Macs, only the SSDs that feature in our Macs now are more limited in capacity, and high-res video, photos, music and other essential files have up more storage than ever.

Running out of space can really hamper your computing: if you want your Mac to run chop-chop yous need to make sure you've got something like 10 percent of your storage free at all times otherwise your Mac can actually slow down (read: How to speed up a Mac). At worst if you lot don't delete some of the things taking up storage infinite on your Mac you may even notice y'all can't start it up one twenty-four hour period because the startup deejay is total! Y'all may be seeing warnings that your start-up disk is about full - you shouldn't ignore them.

Yous may also need to clear some space on your Mac is if y'all are installing an operating system update. When Apple released macOS Big Sur in 2020, for example, a lot of Mac users found that they didn't take enough free infinite to install the new macOS (read: Non plenty infinite for Big Sur). We are anticipating similar problems when macOS Monterey arrives on 25 Oct 2021. Under those circumstances you are likely to wait for the quick and like shooting fish in a barrel ways to gratis up space on a Mac - so finding how to observe out what is taking up the space on your Mac, and the all-time way to remove information technology, will be your priority.

If you aren't certain how to see how much deejay space your Mac has read: How to bank check how much deejay space you have.

In this commodity we walk yous through simple steps that will help you identify what is taking upwardly space on your Mac, what yous can and can't delete, the safest way to remove the biggest space hogs, and how to manage the storage on your Mac so that you never run out of space again.

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How to clear space on Mac quickly

In that location are lots of ideas beneath for freeing up disk infinite below, simply if you are in a hurry and y'all don't demand a lot of infinite, or if you lot aren't too bothered about making certain yous don't run out of space again, here are a few things you can exercise right now:

  1. Click on your Downloads binder, open information technology in the Finder, and select the contents, or whatsoever files you don't demand, right-click and cull Move to Bin/Trash.
  2. Open the Finder and navigate to your Home binder (press Shift-command-H). Now press Command-F to open a new Detect window. Click on the drop down beside 'Kind' and cull 'Other'. Gyre downward until you run into 'File Size' and check the box next to it. Click OK. Now in the next dropdown choose 'is greater than'. Change file size to MB and type 100 into the box besides that. At present select anything that you don't need that'south bigger than 100MB and chose Move to Bin/Trash.Delete files over 100MB
  3. You could set a similar search to delete files y'all haven't opened in the past year or longer. Instead of Kind choose Last opened engagement. Instead of 'is' choose 'before' and change the date to a year ago. Select and right-click on files yous are sure you won't demand again and choose Move to Bin/Trash.
  4. If you are anything like united states your Desktop is a dumping footing. Open up the Finder again and choose the Desktop folder. Sort past Size and delete anything yous don't need that'south particularly big. Alternatively sort past Kind to rapidly locate all the Screenshots (which volition be PNG files). Select those yous want to delete and choose Move to Bin/Trash.Delete from Desktop
  5. Another way to delete screenshots is to go to your Desktop and if you haven't already washed then become to the menu and choose View > Use Stacks (yous'll need to have the Desktop selected). Now find your Screenshot binder. Click on it to open it upward and then select as many Screenshots equally yous are comfortable deleting. Y'all can click and drag these to the Trash/Bin. You lot could do the same with other files on your Desktop (it'due south where nigh things end up after all).
  6. Now the final and almost important step: Right-click on your Trash/Bin and choose Empty Trash/Empty Bin (we are doing this last every bit nosotros've just added lots to the Trash!)

This might recover a few GB for y'all, and if that's all yous demand and so job done! But if you demand to become a lot more than space, and if you lot desire to avoid running low on infinite once again then follow the steps below.

How to see what's taking up space on Mac

If you are running out of space your Mac could exist slowing down, which is bad enough, just if yous run out of infinite on your Mac you may not even be able to start it up! Before you go to that phase take a wait to meet what information technology taking upwards the space on your Mac because that volition decide what you should delete.

There are several apps that will show you which files are taking upwardly large chunks of disk space, or allow y'all to lodge files in the Finder based on their size.

Free or cheap apps similar GrandPerspective and DaisyDisk (£9.99/$9.99, buy it hither) give good visual indications while OmniDiskSweeper uses the standard hierarchical file window to show the sizes of every file and folder. CleanMyMac (which costs around £xxx/$30) shows deejay usage every bit office of its cleanup features. Parallels Toolbox (around £15/$15) also has a Make clean Bulldoze tool forth with lots of other useful tools.

However, earlier you spend any money, it's actually really easy to go an overview of what's taking upwards the space on your Mac.

  1. Click on the Apple tree logo in the top left.
  2. Cull About This Mac.
  3. Click on the Storage tab and look while information technology calculates. Eventually you volition encounter various bars indicating how much storage is given to certain things, and how much storage is available.

    Delete Other Storage

  4. Hover over the different bars to encounter what each represents and how much infinite they are taking upwards. For example, in our case yellow was Photos (less than 10GB because we store them in iCloud, but y'all could have 100GB+ of Photos).

This view shows yous how much infinite certain things are taking upward, but how do you delete the stuff that is taking upwards the space?

What are Organization and Other?

We'll first with the two biggest culprits, at least in our case: Other and System - and that's likely to be the case for you too. You lot may be wondering if yous tin can delete Other. That isn't something y'all can do easily - and nor should you. We explain How to delete Other on a Mac in a separate commodity though.

The same goes for System. It would exist unwise to delete the vast majority of your System files, but there are a few that you tin can probably practise without, such as Time Auto snapshots, iOS backups, and and so on. We besides take a separate commodity about what's in System and what you can delete.

Tools like CleanMyMac Ten can help y'all deal with these Other and System files. CleanMyMac is £29.95/$29.95 (here'due south where you can download CleanMyMac). We likewise have a circular up of the Best Mac Cleaners in which we look at a number of alternatives to CleanMyMac including: DaisyDisk, MacBooster, Parallels ToolBox, and MacCleaner Pro.

How Apple helps you save space

Moving on from Other and System we are left with a number of things we tin can delete from our Macs - and Apple makes it really easy to do so.

Click on the Apple logo > About This Mac > Storage and now click on Manage.

Storage Mac

On the left of this window Apple shows you lot how much infinite is attributed to the various unlike things on your Mac. Aside from System and Other, which are greyed out, you can click on any of these and go to options that help you delete any storage hogs. We'll go through each of these options in the sections below.

Storage Recommendations

In the centre of the window Apple offers y'all Recommendations to aid you regain some of the space on your Mac. You lot can make various tweaks including choosing to shop files in iCloud, optimising storage, setting your Bin/Trash to empty automatically, or reviewing files to reduce ataxia. We'll explain each of these options in the sections beneath.

Store in iCloud

We recall that the option to Store in iCloud should exist your outset port of call if you want to repossess lots of space on your Mac. Apple's actually upgraded iCloud - it's now iCloud+ and includes a number of additional features, but the price hasn't gone upward. Read: iCloud becomes iCloud+, with range of new features.

The Store in iCloud option gives you lot the choice of storing files in iCloud. It's a great option if you lot take limited storage on your Mac: go yourself a nice chunk of storage in the deject and keep everything y'all need in that location. If you don't mind paying for it this is a slap-up way to extend the storage available to you.

Apple tree gives users 5GB of iCloud storage for gratuitous, only that's not going to to be of much help here. Apple offers diverse amounts of storage on a subscription footing, at that place should be something to accommodate you.  The prices for iCloud storage are as follows:

  • 5GB: complimentary
  • 50GB: 79p/99c a month
  • 200GB: £2.49/$ii.99 a month
  • 2TB: £6.99/$ix.99 a month

We should also mention that Apple has a bundle offer, known as Apple One, where you can become iCloud storage as part of a deal that includes Apple Music, Apple tree TV+ and Apple Arcade. Prices offset at £14.95/$14.95 a month. Read Should I become Apple tree One? for more data.

If you lot spend some coin on iCloud, and store your desktop and documents and all your photos in that location, you can save a huge chunk of storage and an even bigger bonus is the fact that you'll be able to access those files and photos on any Apple device you ain or by logging onto iCloud with your Apple ID.

Here's what you need to do to make space on your Mac by moving files and photos to iCloud:

  1. Click on the Store in iCloud choice (via About This Mac > Storage > Manage).
  2. This opens a window asking you to cull what you desire to store in iCloud. This can be all the files on your Mac Desktop and your Documents binder and all your Photos. Select both.
  3. Click on Store in iCloud.

Use iCloud

If you want to really cutting back on the amount of infinite taken up past your photos we'll discuss some more changes you can make beneath in our reduce photograph library department.

Optimise Storage

Another really easy way to stop your storage getting clogged up on your Mac is to turn on Optimise Storage.

Optimise Storage is Apple tree's side by side recommendation after Store in iCloud.

If you turn on Optimise Storage it will delete TV shows or films that you've watched and it sometime email attachments will be removed. You needn't be afraid of losing either of these things because the emails volition still be stored on the email server anyway, and the shows you had purchased from Apple'southward iTunes Store can always be downloaded again for free.

To cull this option become to About My Mac > Storage > Manage and click on Optimise Storage.

Once you have chosen this choice your storage will be optimised automatically.

Empty Trash Automatically

We already mentioned emptying the trash as one of the quick ways to get more than storage on your Mac.

The easiest way to empty your trash is to correct-click on the trash tin can icon and choose Empty Trash/Empty Bin.

Nevertheless, you can likewise click on Bin/Trash in the side-bar on the left of your About My Mac > Storage > Manage window and delete it at that place.

It's really good practice to empty your Trash regularly though and Apple has a swell fashion to automate this activity.

If y'all choose Apple tree's Empty Trash Automatically recommendation it will empty files out of your Trash (or Bin if you are in the Britain) after they take been there for 30 days. Here'southward how to set it up:

  1. Switch this option on in Nigh My Mac > Storage > Manage.
  2. Cull the Empty Trash Automatically option.
  3. Click Turn On…
  4. You will see an alert request if you're certain y'all want to erase Trash automatically. It should be pretty safe every bit 30 days is a long time to realise you didn't mean to delete something, so we recommend you click Plough On.

How to free space on a Mac: Empty trash automatically

Reduce Clutter

This is Apple'due south last Recommendation plant in About My Mac > Storage > Manage.

Reduce Clutter will review the content of your Mac and make information technology piece of cake for yous to delete files yous don't need.

TIP: Rather than open up files or documents to see what yous are considering deleting, select the file and press the space bar to see a preview.

Click on Review Files and you will be taken to a pane that shows tabs for Big Files, Downloads, Unsupported Apps, Containers and a File Browser (depending on which version of macOS you have). This is actually the aforementioned view you would run into if y'all clicked on Documents in the side-bar on the left.

Nosotros don't accept any Large Files on our MacBook Pro, but if we did we'd exist able to see them here. You lot tin determine whether to delete them or not based on the data provided which includes when you lot accessed them last and their size.

Next pick is Downloads. Here yous'll see the files y'all have downloaded from the cyberspace. As with the trash it'southward a expert thought to delete the contents of this folder from time to time as information technology is surprising how much space a few downloads can take up.

To delete what's in your Downloads right now select the files you want to remove and choose Delete. The practiced affair near deleting Downloads this way is that it won't just move them to your Trash. If you delete straight from the Downloads folder you will need to Empty Trash too.

If you lot accept any Unsupported Apps yous will meet them in that section. Y'all might meet former 32-chip apps hither, for example.

We'll skip Containers equally it's unlikely that there will exist anything in that view for you to delete.

In File Brower you tin quickly admission folders for Pictures, Desktop, Music, Movies, Documents and so on.

How to free space on a Mac: Reduce clutter

Those are the steps that Apple offers to help yous manage the storage bachelor on your Mac. We'll now go in to a fleck more detail on some of the other ways to save space, of which in that location are many.

Reduce your Mac photo library

If you have a large photo library you lot might be thinking that you could salvage some infinite past deleting the hundreds of blurry or non-so-good photos. While in that location are apps that will offering to delete duplicate photos on your Mac (such equally Photos Duplicate Cleaner or MacPaw's Gemini ii, the later on of which offers to remove indistinguishable files from your Mac.)

However, there is a much less effort manner to reduce the amount of photos on your Mac: move them to iCloud.

We already touched on Photos above, when nosotros mentioned that if you lot choose the Store in iCloud option in Most This Mac > Storage > Manage you can choose to shop your photos in iCloud.

The benefit of using iCloud Photo Library is that whatsoever photos you lot upload to your Mac in the future also appear on your other devices: iPhone, iPad so on.

Our Photo library (prior to turning on iCloud Photo Library) was 96GB we started off by paying for the 200GB of infinite Apple offers. Months later nosotros had upgraded to the full 2TB as we were storing all our documents, desktop, photos and more in iCloud.

  1. You lot might accept turned on iCloud Photo Library, only if you haven't already you could exercise so in the Photos app. Go to Photos > Preferences.
  2. Check the box beside iCloud Photos.
  3. This is important: Select Optimise Mac Storage to brand sure that your total-resolution photos are replaced with depression-res versions (you can always download the full-res version if you lot demand information technology).

With that setting your library should somewhen shrink every bit the loftier res versions of your images are switched for low-res versions. But annotation that y'all will also get low res versions of all the images you have on all of your devices, so it's possible that you may not save a lot of space.

Beware that if you delete photos from your Mac they volition exist deleted from iCloud likewise: iCloud is not a way to back up your photos so that you lot can delete them from your Mac.

If y'all want to remove your photo library to free up space look at our side by side suggestion.

Move photos to external storage

Another option is to free upward space on your Mac by moving your photo library to an external hard drive. Nosotros have a divide article that describes how to motion your photo library from your Mac to an external drive, only we'll summarise the steps below.

  1. Quit Photos.
  2. Copy your Photos Library to an external drive. (To salve having to delete them once again afterwards, press the Command central when you drag the files over so that they are moved, with the original files automatically deleted, rather than copied.)
  3. Once the files have finished copying, concord down the Selection/Alt fundamental while starting up Photos.
  4. In Photos select Photos > Preferences and in General choose Employ as Arrangement Photo Library.
  5. If you have iCloud Photograph Library enabled, the Mac may get busy equally it works out which photos reside in iCloud, but if should eventually complete without requiring a massive information transfer.

Move your music library

Your Music library (iTunes in older versions of macOS) might be another candidate for re-challenge disk space, especially if you spent a lot of time importing CDs many years ago. If your iTunes library holds a few GB worth of music you have a few options.

Y'all can copy the whole thing from your Music directory to an external hard drive and indicate Music/iTunes to it from Preferences. That's great if your Mac is a desktop model, but not platonic if it's a notebook - unless you have a NAS bulldoze to which you connect wirelessly. Nosotros take a divide tutorial on how to motility your iTunes library to an external hard drive.

Another option is to pay £21.99/year to subscribe to iTunes Lucifer. Hither'south how to set up iTunes Match. Annotation: If you have an Apple Music membership, y'all get all of the benefits of iTunes Match, plus access to the entire Apple Music catalogue. So you don't demand both.

Once you've set up it up, iTunes Match allows you to access all the music in your music Library on Apple's servers, significant yous don't have to have it stored locally at all. You'll need to be continued to the internet in guild to play music, just other than that, it'due south just similar using Music/iTunes with locally stored music.

And, as a bonus, if you decide at a later date that you lot want to download your music from iTunes Lucifer, yous get 256-bit AAC files which are probably of better quality than the ones you had stored on your Mac.

The final option here is to subscribe to Apple Music, Apple's service that for £9.99 a month gives you access to its whole music library, so assuming that all the music you relish is on iTunes you can delete all your music from your Mac and but stream the music from Apple Music instead.

If at a later date you decide not to subscribe anymore, you will always exist able to download for free any tracks yous bought from the iTunes Music Shop before you took out the subscription, just notation that unless you accept iTunes Match yous won't be able to download tracks that you uploaded to your iTunes library yourself, so don't throw out those CDs just yet.

Remove unwanted apps

In that location is an option in Mac > Storage > Manage to remove unsupported apps, but what about the other apps you accept installed but don't use and don't need?

Deleting apps is pretty simple on a Mac - ordinarily - and nosotros embrace it in detail here: How to Uninstall Mac Apps.

  • You can either delete an app from the Applications binder in the Finder: right-click on the app and chose Move to Bin/Trash.
  • Or y'all can press F4 to open Launchpad, observe the app, press Alt/Option and hover over on the app. Click on the x to delete it.

However, some macOS apps have preferences (plist) and awarding support files and these can be in a number of places on your Mac. In those cases the methods above won't delete all the associated files and libraries associated with an app.

If you want to brand absolutely sure that every trace of an app is gone then you lot tin can effort an app that deletes apps thoroughly.

Some major apps include an uninstaller. For example, yous'll find one of these in the Additional Tools binder of Microsoft Office. Sometimes an app'southward installer doubles as an uninstaller. Merely the lack of a defended uninstaller in macOS is a serious omission.

Fortunately there are a number of third-political party options. AppCleaner (costless, download from the Mac App Shop here), AppDelete ($7.99) and AppZapper ($12.95) are good options, every bit are CleanMyMac X, Uninstaller and CleanApp.

Another tip is to make sure you quit apps running in the background. Quitting apps that have been open for several days or more than, or even restarting your Mac completely on a regular basis, will also assist gratis up disk space.

Applications create temporary files to shop data and the longer they run without quitting, the bigger those files become. When yous quit the app, the cache files are deleted and the disk infinite returned.

Remove duplicate files

Identifying and dumping duplicate files is another skilful way of freeing up deejay infinite. Gemini costs £xv.95 on the Mac App Shop (in the US y'all can buy it on the Mac Store for $19.99) and allows you to scan your Mac for indistinguishable files so you can dump i copy.

How to free space on a Mac: Gemini

How much of your precious difficult drive space is being taken up past duplicate files? While difficult drives may be getting bigger and cheaper, Apple's direction is that of smaller, faster SSD drives. The problem is that these have smaller capacities so a higher level of filing discipline is essential.

In that location are a number of reasons why y'all end upwards with so many dupe files. When you add songs to iTunes, if yous have 'Re-create files to iTunes Media folder when calculation to library' checked in the preferences, you proceed the original. Instant duplication. A couple of thousand high quality songs and that's anything up to 10GB difficult drive infinite wasted. And that doesn't include dupes within iTunes.

If you use Apple Postal service, remember that all attachments reside in Mail's ain download folder. This can be another source of duplication.

More generic apps use various strategies and criteria to find duplicates and give you command over which ones to become rid of. Accept a expect at Tidy Up ($29.99) or Singlemizer (£ix.99/$9.99 on the Mac App Store).

Remove extra languages

macOS supports a range of languages, beingness localised for more than than 25 languages all of which are included automatically during installation. Get to Arrangement Preferences > Language & Region; here languages tin exist put into preferred club making it like shooting fish in a barrel to switch betwixt them.

Many major applications support multiple languages too, using the order from Language & Text to select one if the app doesn't back up your main linguistic communication. The trouble is that if you only want to use i or two languages, macOS and many of your apps are swollen with all the others.

If you desire to delete actress language files that you know you lot won't be needing, go to the Resources folder and look for folders ending in .lproj. Each of those folders will include a linguistic communication file. You should exist able to trash these folders without any problems.

Remove unwanted code

Getting rid of unwanted lawmaking is another disk-saving exercise.

Monolingual (donation requested) lets you remove specific architectures from macOS along with specific languages. While it can claw dorsum huge swathes of hard bulldoze space, it can also render your Mac unbootable if you're not careful. Utilize with caution.

How to free space on a Mac: Monolingual

Use deject storage infinite

Nosotros've discussed iCloud already, merely there are other cloud storage options.

Cloud storage services are great for making files available remotely, but they can also accept upwards infinite on your Mac. Both Dropbox and OneDrive, for example, sync everything you store in them with your Mac by default - assuming you've installed the Dropbox/ OneDrive app.

If you only accept the default 2GB storage available for gratuitous from Dropbox, that's not likewise much of a trouble. But Microsoft gives Role 365 subscribers 1TB of space costless, so if you use that to store lots of files, yous could observe yourself running out of deejay space very quickly. The aforementioned is true if you lot pay for more space on Dropbox.

In both cases, however, you can choose to sync but files and folders you specify.

In Dropbox, click on the carte bar particular, then click the cog and then Preferences. Click the Account tab, then click Change Settings. At present untick the files and folders you don't want to sync with your Mac.

In OneDrive, click the menu bar item, then Preferences. Click Choose Folders, then Choose Folders, then Choose Folders to sync. Untick folders, or click the expand arrow to admission private files and untick those.

An alternative would be to sign up for more iCloud storage, as we mentioned earlier.

Archive or fill-in

Y'all might exist thinking I need the space, only I don't want to delete anything! If you really are the proverbial data squirrel, here are a few simple suggestions:

Archive any files yous're unlikely to need regularly. Ctrl-click on a folder and select the compress option. (Hither'due south more info on how to zero Mac files.) The space saved volition vary according to the blazon of file being archived: JPEGs and DMGs, for instance, are unlikely to compress very much. Once created, archives can either remain on your Mac or be saved to an external drive.

Finally, if y'all exercise have the decision to delete files or folders, always back them up outset.