everyday mac tools

Free up space on a Mac without deleting your photos or documents

· 7 min read

Much of what fills a Mac is not your photos or your documents. Installers you ran once, old iPhone backups, app caches, apps you stopped using and the files they left behind, music and TV you can download again, and developer files can all go without touching anything you made. Start in System Settings, General, Storage to see which of those is large on your Mac, then work down the list below, from the safest steps to the more involved ones.

See where the space actually goes

Open System Settings, General, Storage. The colored bar at the top splits the disk into categories, and each category in the list has an information button that shows what is inside. Note two numbers before you delete anything: Documents, which counts your Downloads folder and installers as well as your own files, and System Data, which is mostly caches, logs and other working files that macOS and apps create.

The Recommendations at the top deserve a look, with care. Empty Trash Automatically removes items once they have been in the Trash for 30 days. Store in iCloud moves files and photos to iCloud and keeps only some of them on the Mac, which saves space but is a bigger change than it sounds; Optimize Mac Storage in iCloud explains what it removes and when.

Clear the things you only needed once

These are safe to remove on almost every Mac.

  1. Disk images and installer packages. Open Downloads, choose View, as List, and sort by Kind. Once an app is installed and opens, its .dmg or .pkg file has done its job. Can you delete DMG files after installing an app covers the rare exceptions.
  2. A leftover Install macOS app. A full macOS installer in Applications takes many gigabytes and is not needed once the update is done.
  3. Archives you have already expanded. If the unzipped folder sits beside the zip file, the zip is a second copy.
  4. The Trash. Empty it. Files you trashed from an external drive wait in a hidden Trash on that drive, so connect it before you empty the Trash. Emptied the Trash but the Mac got no space back explains the other reasons the number stays put.

Remove old iPhone and iPad backups

Backups of a phone or tablet made to the Mac stay until you delete them, including backups of devices you sold years ago. In Storage, click the information button next to iOS Files to see each backup with its date. Keep the newest backup of any device you still use, unless it already backs up to iCloud, and delete the rest. Find and delete old iPhone backups on a Mac has the details.

Uninstall apps you no longer use

The information button next to Applications lists every app with its size. Sort by size and look for apps you have not opened in a year. Removing an app does not remove the documents you saved with it, since those live in your own folders. The exception is apps that keep your work inside their own library, such as some note-taking, journaling and music apps: export from those before you remove them.

Dragging an app to the Trash leaves its support files behind in your Library folder, sometimes gigabytes of them. Uninstall an app on a Mac completely shows where those leftovers sit.

Let caches and downloads rebuild themselves

Some files exist only to save time or bandwidth, and the app recreates them when needed.

  • Caches. Most app caches can be deleted while the app is closed and will be rebuilt. Which caches are safe to delete on a Mac separates the safe ones from the few that are not.
  • Media downloads. Songs, podcast episodes and TV shows you downloaded for offline use can be removed and streamed or downloaded again later. This applies to purchases and subscriptions, not to music files you imported yourself.
  • Developer files. Build folders, Xcode data, simulators and package caches regrow on their own and can reach tens of gigabytes on a working developer’s Mac.
  • Messages attachments. Handle these with more care. They are copies of what people sent you, and some photos and videos may exist nowhere else, so review them rather than clearing them in bulk.

Time Machine’s local snapshots and other purgeable space also show up as used, but macOS frees that space by itself when something needs it, so there is nothing to delete there.

Remove duplicates, and move rather than delete

Deleting a second copy of a file loses nothing. In Photos, the Duplicates album under Utilities lets you merge copies of the same picture into one, keeping the best version and its details. For files elsewhere, Find duplicate files on a Mac without deleting the wrong copy shows how to compare before you remove anything.

If the space you need is larger than any of this, move older material instead of deleting it. Copy finished projects or past years’ folders to an external drive, open a few files from the drive to confirm they work, then remove them from the Mac. A Photos library can live on an external drive too: hold Option while opening Photos to choose which library it uses.

Seeing the whole Mac before you decide

Storage settings describe your own account well but say little about what sits inside System Data, or which account is using the space on a shared Mac. Crumb is a menu bar disk cleaner that audits the whole Mac. Its read-only audit breaks System Data into caches, logs, swap, temporary files and leftovers, and shows Time Machine local snapshots, iOS backups and a leaderboard of which user account is using the space. You can reclaim by category, such as caches, build artifacts or package caches, and the total is shown before you commit. Ask Crumb explains what an item is, whether it regenerates and what breaks if it goes, then proposes a plan, and nothing is deleted until you approve it.

The audit, the System Data breakdown and one full cleanup are free forever. A one-time $9 unlocks the rest on up to two Macs: Uninstall, which removes an app with every leftover, plus Duplicates, Organize, Ask Crumb and the cross-user tools. It runs on macOS 12 Monterey or later, and file contents never leave the Mac.

Questions

How much free space should I keep? Enough for macOS updates and for the system’s own working files to grow. How much free space should a Mac have gives a sensible target.

Will clearing caches make my Mac faster? Usually not. Caches exist to make things faster, and the first launch after clearing them is often slower. Clear them for space, not speed.

I freed space and it filled up again. Why? Something is regrowing: a cache, a sync, local snapshots or swap. Your Mac fills up again a week after you cleared it tracks down the usual causes.