How to free up space on Mac? Here we'll introduce 10 quick tips to clean up gigabytes of disk 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,. These six classes or categories are documents, photos, movies, audios, applications, Other. How to Clear Disk Space on Mac. Here are 12 free solutions on how to free up disk space on Mac. Bird photo booth download pictures on mac. They are outlined below. Optimize Storage. This is the built-in feature from Mac OS Sierra.
Hi, I've had a Macbook Pro for about a year now, and I'm pretty happy with it. I've used up about 255GB of the disc space on it and I'm wondering how I can free up more space (Like get it back so there's 250+GB left). I'm used to doing this on a PC and I'm still fairly new on a Mac. Thanks. - Daniel
The problem 'startup disk is full on mac' is all too common for Mac users. Even if you buy a Mac with a 750GB hard disk, you can run out of the Mac space quickly with lots of media files such as movies, music and photos. Worse still, iTunes or Photo library can quickly fill up the 64GB or 128GB SSD of Macbook Pro/Air, leaving little room for anything else. It's awfully terrible to have low space on Mac, and you'll get crazy when your Mac runs slowly. So how to free up space on MacOS? Here are 10 quick tips to clean up gigabytes of disk space on Macbook Pro, Macbook Air and iMac, iMac Pro.
Pre-preparations Before You Make more Space on Your Startup Disk
Before you start to free up drive space on Mac, there are two things to do:
- Check the used/available disk space - Click the Apple menu > Select 'About This Mac' > Click on the 'More Info' button > Choose the 'Storage' tab to check the disk storage overview and capacity.
- Backup important or useful files - We cannot rule out the possibility that you need to delete files to clean up disk space on Mac. So you'd better backup important and useful files before Mac disc cleanup. Then follow tips below to figure out how to win back some storage space on Mac.
iTunes Alternative - Backup iPhone iPad to Mac without Duplication
MacX MediaTrans is the best alternative to iTunes that can backup music, photos and videos from iPhone iPad to Mac (macOS 11 Big Sur incl.), and reversely. No longer worry about taking too much space on Macbook Pro/Air, iMac.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Mac Disk Cleanup Features on macOS
If you have upgraded to macOS 11 Big Sur, you may notice a small feature of it – 'When you need more space, let your Mac find it for you'. The new macOS 11 Big Sur will help you clear out duplicates, app installers and other superfluous stuff, which could solve Mac startup disk full problem very well.
Just go to the menu and choose 'About This Mac' and then flip over to the Storage tab. Once you are there, you can go through the settings to clean out iTunes movies and shows, find large files, set the trash to empty automatically every 30 days, and a number of other settings. By the way, the Mac disk cleanup will speed up MacOS as well in return.
Part 2: Delete Old Devices Backups to Free Up Drive Space
Actually every time you synced your iPhone iPad iPod with iTunes, it automatically backs up specific files and settings to your Mac, which will take up too much space on your Mac computer. So if you wanna clean up Mac disk space, you can delete your old iDevices backups. You are suggested to keep the most recent backups of your iPhone iPad iPod and delete the older ones.
Find them: Home > Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backup.
Delete them within following steps: Choose iTunes > Preferences > Click Devices > Select the backup you want to remove > Click Delete Backup.
Note: If you do not want to have too many backups on your Mac computer daily, you can switch to an iTunes alternative to backup iPhone to Mac. MacX MediaTrans is a nice choice, which transfers iPhone iPad iPod to Mac without duplication. And surely it won't take up too much disk space on your Mac computer.
Part 3: Uninstall Unused Applications and App Caches
Applications occupy disk space of Mac of course. But are you sure you used all applications installed on your Mac? I guess there must be some of rarely-used. You can uninstall apps like Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run etc. you got from Mac App Store or other websites to free up disk space of Mac. And there are still some other barely used apps belongs to Mac OS X, which is unable to install. But you are clear the caches of these apps for more space reserved on Mac.
Uninstall unused apps: Click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, hold down an app's icon until all the icons begin to jiggle, then click an app's delete button . If you later want the app, you can re-install it from the Mac App Store.
Part 4: Delete Unnecessary Media Files From iTunes
iTunes has grown from a humble MP3 manager to massive application which handles music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and iOS apps these years, which can take tons of GB. We benefit a lot from iTunes, but it does become the single largest consumer of your Mac's precious storage space. So removing unnecessary media files that take up the most space on your Mac seems to be effective to make more space on Mac.
Check your current storage situation by launching iTunes and selecting a media type - movies, TV shows, music, etc. Take 'Movies' as an example, you can delete the movies without a cloud icon on the lower-right corner, which tells you the movie is local rather than purchased or movies transferred from iPhone to Mac in the cloud.
Part 5: Locate and Compress Large files to Smaller Size
There are always some files are essential but in big size. They take up too much space, but you cannot delete them. How t free up space on Mac in this situation? Never mind, you can compress the large files to smaller size in .zip, .rar, .mp4 etc. Generally speaking, a zip file will be about 10% smaller than all of the files were before they were compressed, this feature works best with medium size files. And a mp4 video is smaller than mkv, m2ts, avi formatted video, not to mention you can also compress UHD 4K to 1080P, 720P, 480P, 360P resolution.
▶ Compress Large files to ZIP:
1. Select multiple files and folders by holding down the Shift key (for multiple items) or the Command key (for several individual items) and clicking.
2. Right click the files and folders, choose 'Compress Items' and a compressed file with the .zip extension will be created. And you can delete the original files and folders.
▶ Compress/Convert Videos to MP4:
Powerful Mac video converter can do you a favor on converting and compress videos to MP4 for smaller size. And MacX Video Converter Pro is the one to help you free up disk space on Mac by converting videos to MP4 or other smaller size formats as well as compressing MP4 video file size.
Free download the MP4 video converter and launch it > Load the target big size video > Choose MP4 as the output format > Decrease resolution (optional) > Click 'RUN' to compress video to MP4.
Part 6: Clear Temporary Files for Mac Disk Cleanup
Your Mac's hard drive probably has temporary files you don't need. These files often take up disk space for no good reason. When you are struggle on how to free up space on Mac, you are suggest to clear temporary files such as browsers caches, internet history cookies, download history and so on.
Meanwhile, you can also quit the running applications to release Mac hard drive space since Apps like Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, Spotify, and many others, create temporary cache files while they're in use.
Part 7: Tackle the Contents in Downloads Directory
The Downloads folder is notorious for growing gigantic when left unchecked for a while. It's the default location for all of the files you download in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, but thanks to the way that these browsers can automatically open or launch files once they're downloaded, many users build up a huge pile of old and unneeded junk in this folder.
To free up drive space on your Macbok Air/Pro, iMac, you can go Downloads directory and sort by file size, then delete anything (everything) you don't need any more. BTW, if you have a good habit that once you install an app, delete the installer .DMG file, zip file, or archive it came from, you will not be rarely be bothered with how to free up space on Mac.
Part 8: Empty Trash Cans to Free Up Disk Space Mac
Emptying Trash cans obviously works on how to get more free space on your mac. But you'd be amazed at the numbers of big files that sitting in the trash for years. Here are three options to remove trash cans files:
- Open Finder in the menu bar on the top > Click Empty Trash
- Right-click on the Trash icon in your Dock > Choose Empty Trash
- Launching Finder and use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-Delete
Part 9: Remove Unused Languages to Free Up Space on Mac
As one of the computer giants, Macs are worldwide popular, which has been sold in more than 100 countries around the world with different languages. Almost every Mac application comes with several language files it supports so that it satisfies all almost all its users. But the fact is that you only need one or several languages indeed. So removing unused languages is another way to free up disc space on your mac's hard drive.
You can used Monolingual to remove those language files for Mac disk cleanup. Actually it does help you on freeing up drive space, but not suggested. If you have a big hard disk with more than enough free space, just keep them for the possibility of future use.
Part 10: Restarting the Mac & Installing System Updates
If it's been a while since you restarted your Mac, sometimes doing so will reclaim a bit of space, as the macOS reboot process involves clearing certain cache and temporary files which may have accumulated in the days and weeks since your last reboot. Of course, you'll do that under the Apple Menu at the top-left of your screen.
Or if you have downloaded System Updates but haven't install it yet, rebooting the Mac will find out the wasted sizable gigabytes space the System Updates occupied and install it to free up drive space on Mac.
No matter which approach you take to free up space on your Mac, keep in mind that you should always make sure that your backups are solid before getting started. And DO NOT delete anything if you don't know what it is. The effective solution of 'How to free up extra hard drive space on Mac' is definitely not to delete stuff in System folder, all right?
Finally, if you are also an iPhone user, you might also in wondering how to free up space your devices with 8GB, 16GB or 32GB storage. Yes, we gathered some effective tips to clean up space on iPhone iPad as well, please refer to How to Free Up Space on iPhone >>
First, let's see how much free space you have on your Mac and see what's taking up most of the space on your Mac.
You can click manage here and get some recommendations to clear more space.
You can also look at other folders here and delete files or move them to external hard drives.
If the other folder is taking a lot of space on your Mac, check out this video:
How To Delete 'Other' Files From Any Mac
You can also use CleanMyMacX to do a system scan and remove a lot of space on your Mac without any manual actions: (affiliate link)
For external hard drives, here are two I recommend (amazon affiliate)
How to Free Space on Mac
Hey everyone. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to free up some space on your Mac, and this works on every Mac from your laptop, all the way to an iMac or Mac Pro and I'm going to show you a few different things to try, but before you do anything, I recommend running a time machine backup because we are going to permanently delete things on your Mac.
The time machine backup basically mirrors everything you have on an external hard drive and then if you lose anything, you could just go ahead and run that time machine backup. Now I have an entirely different video on how to use a time machine to back up your Mac. This is not the video for that, but I recommend you wash down and you do that first.
Let me show you a couple of things. Now, these are external hard drives and I'll put a couple of them in the description box below this video if you want to check them out. But basically, these do with the time machine is your entire computer gets backed up to one of these. So if anything goes wrong or you delete something, you shouldn't have.
You'll always have it on the sectional hard drive and you can back it up from there. These are the two that I recommend and I've used them for about 10 years of so doing backups on my Mac now, after you've done a time machine backup, let's jump here on the Mac and clear some space. So the first thing we want to do is we want to go up here to the Apple logo and press about this Mac and then on this page, this is just going to tell you everything that your computer has like your processor, memory and things like that. But we want to go to the storage tab right here. This right here is your internal hard drive. This is the hard drive sitting on your laptop or your computer desktop and it's going to basically take a second to tell you how much space you've used up and how much space is available and it's going to break this down into different categories in a second. Ignore these two. These are the external hard drives that I mentioned and you could see, even one of these is almost filled up here, almost four terabytes of information, but I make videos.
So that's a little unusual to fill up this much space. You typically will never fill off four terabytes of the hard drive if you don't make videos, but let's focus on this. Now I have a one terabyte flash drive on this computer and let's take a look. It says two 81, 2 documents. Apps are taking up a bunch of parallels.
I'm running windows actually on this Mac. So that's taken up some space and others. Look at that almost 400 gigabytes. I actually have a whole separate video on how to clear other sections, but I will touch upon it in this video as well. So now that we have a good understanding of how much space we have left and what's taken up this space, let's go ahead and manage that.
Just click this option, manage, and we'll get to a more advanced option in a second. But right now under manage. Is this story in iCloud. A lot of times your files, photos, messages are taken up a good amount of space. So instead of capturing those on your computer's hard drive, you could store them in the cloud.
If I press this year, it's going to tell me that I could basically put documents, photos, and messages and store them in iCloud. Now, most likely this is going to ask you to. Get more space and buy more space in iCloud, but it's relatively cheap. I think for about $3, you could get a couple of hundred gigabytes worth, which is a lot of space.
But if you don't want to do that, you could skip the section. I'll show you some other ways to free up some space. But this is definitely one of the places to look. The next one is optimizing storage. I've already done this, but you're going to get an option to optimize storage here and this removes a lot of TV shows, especially if you use Apple TV, movies, and TV shows through Apple TV, that's going to take a lot of space.
So I definitely recommend you do this next. Then typically you want to empty your trashcan and you will, you could turn this on, on automatic. Now I don't have my turn on, but you could come down here, press your trashcan and then press empty right here. If there is a lot of information here that typically tends to empty a few gigabytes, if you just have things sitting in the trash, you could always turn it on over here as well.
Then this is really easy to use. Reduce clutter. If you press review files, what it does is it shows you all your files on your computer and you could go ahead and press the size option, and it's going to show you things by how big they are. It's just shorting them by size. So look at this windows is taken out five gigs here.
This video file is taken out 4 gigs here. These drone shots are taken up 3 gigs, a piece, so I could easily see what's taken up space and if I want to either delete it, I could press delete here. Or typically what I do is I go down here show in finder. So I'll select this one, 4 gigs showing finder, and here's the file and then I'll open up my external hard drive and actually drag this into there. So it's just sitting on my external hard drive now instead of my computer's internal hard drive. So let me go back to recommendations. So those are the 4 things that Apple is going to tell you to do here in that order.
Then you could go on the left side and you could see the application is taken up 81 gigabytes. So I could go see, I have 2 versions of adobe premiere pro. Maybe I could delete this one that will save me four gigs and I could basically see again by size, what's taken up the most amount of space, and press delete.
I'll show you one other way at the end of this video, to help you uninstalled apps, which is the way I use them. I typically don't do it here because it leaves a lot of things behind. If you just delete the app here and not the supporting documents and you could keep looking here. If you have music creation here, you could just remove that library.
I never use garage band so I could save a couple of gigs here. I could go to music and again, see if I have anything selected, and press delete here. Photos I have sunk up already with iCloud, so not much going on here. But there may be a good amount being used up with photos and again, the other folder, look at that.
It's still 200 gigs showing over here on the other folder. So let me show you the last option and my favorite way to clean up space. After I go through what Apple's helping me do and this is a very reputable company, clean my Mac X is a software that I use on all my Macs and I have a link in the description for it.
You could download a completely for free and do a full system scan completely for free too. There is a paid option after a certain amount, so it's not completely free, but we'll do a lot of things for free. If you donat wants to pay for the upgrade, I pay for the upgrade because it's just worth my time to run this and not manually remove things every single time I run out of space.
So between this and the external hard drive, I really never worry about space. I just do this about once a month and he just takes care of everything for me. So let me show you what this is going to do here. It's going to show you things that are unneeded junk. You found 6 gigs just like that. So I could go ahead and delete those.
I could review the details on that and see exactly what's going on. A lot of mail attachments. I don't need some system junk, which I wouldn't know how to manually find and there's a little bit in the trashcan, which we manually empty the trashcan. So that's not that important. This is also going to do a whole kind of potential threat protection and speed optimization for me.
You could always do those things on the left side as well. So for example, if I wanted to just take care of system junk, I could come over here, do a scan for that. And I could go ahead and review the details here and this kind of show me everything that is considered system junk and I could either select all of them manually or just let it select all of them and then press clean.
I just loved the graphic representation. This gives me too, and he also shows me the download folder, which I could select and remove things from my download folder that sometimes takes up a bunch of space here of things you've downloaded to your computer. The other thing I like about this is the left side.
There are large and old files. If you go over here, you could do another scan of your entire hard drive and find just basically files that you're not using that are old, that are taken up space. And this is really, really, again, graphic visualization of what I've shown you already. So look at these, all these different files could be just selected here and deleted. Convert photo to line drawing free software mac.
By just pressing remove if you want to remove them. But again, make sure what you're deleting is what you want to delete because you won't get it back and I also use the uninstaller. So this is how I would remove an app that I don't want. So for example, if I want it to remove something, I could just go ahead and select it over here.
So if I want it to remove this app, for example, all selected, this has taken up 3 gigs. It's very useful to show the size and I could press on install here. This is my preferred way of uninstalling because it takes care of everything for you. Debt fast and as far as that other folder, that's taken up a couple of 100 gigabytes on my hard drive.
If I go to space lens here, it's going to scan all my hard drives. So 800 gigabytes and the other folder are just documents that Apple doesn't categorize into documents or movies or photos or applications. So in my case, they are linked inside of my Dropbox. It may be completely different for you, but this gives you a nice representation visually of what's being taken up.
So I could actually jump into the Dropbox folder and see what's going on there. And for some reason, I got a couple of gigs sitting on my hard drive. On the desktop too. So I could go there and I could see, I store a lot of videos in this today, folder here. So I could go ahead and remove those and put them into my external hard drive.
So that's what the other folder is analyzing. So as soon as I remove some of the stories that I have, if I unlink my Dropbox from this computer and just use Dropbox on Dropbox.com, or if I remove these videos from the desktop, it's going to bring down my other folder significantly. So between everything Apple recommends and everything clean my Mac X recommends and takes care of for you and external hard drives, you should be able to save a good amount of space.
I hope you found one of those methods useful and he freed up some space on your Mac and remember the external hard drives are a great way just to get things off the internal hard drive and free up some space. So you never have to worry about it. I haven't bought a dozen of these hard drives for all the videos I've made over the years.
I hope you find this video useful. Please give it a thumbs up and I'll see you next time.
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