For many people, cleaning up their downloads folder is like that one chore they constantly
put off. Well, today I'm going to show you five simple tricks that will help you clean up your
downloads folder with amazing efficiency. That's coming up next on Tech Talk America.
Hey folks and welcome to another short and sweet tutorial video. The first thing that I want you to
do if you're following along at home is to go into your downloads folder and then put it into list
view. By the way, just in case you didn't know, you can do that by using Command 2. The first
trick is to look for any files that have a space after the file name followed by a number. This is
an indication that the file is a duplicate and you can most likely delete it. Speaking of deleting,
when you're going through this process, the keyboard shortcut command delete is significantly
faster than dragging each file manually to the trash. Now that you know the keyboard shortcut
to send files directly to the trash let's look at another Mac feature known as quick look. Let's say
I have a bunch of old receipts and invoices and I need to figure out whether or not I need to keep
them. If I select a file and then tap the space bar on my keyboard, that launches a quick look
of the document. Quick look works with several different types of files, including documents,
pictures, movies, spreadsheets, and audio files. To close quick, look just tap the spacebar again.
Here's a video file. Let's use quick look and tap the space bar. As you can see, the video instantly
starts playing and if you determine that you don't need the file anymore, this is where
command delete comes in handy. When you press that, the file goes directly to the trash and
quick look moves on to the next file. Now let's say with this one I want to keep this file, so in
that case I can tap the down arrow on my keyboard and as you can see quick look advances to the next
file. By using both quick look and the keyboard shortcut to send files directly to the trash, you
can make a lot of progress in very little time. At this point I want you to sort the downloads folder
by size as you can see here at the top we have a few large files but if I scroll to the bottom
of this list there are a bunch of folders that are not calculating the totals. The trick to get
around that is to press command J on your keyboard which opens up view options. Here you will see at
the bottom that we have an option to calculate all sizes. This is something that you may not want to
keep on all the time since it does use more system memory, but when you're going through the process
of cleaning up files it's really helpful. So just don't forget to turn it off when you're done. Now,
if we go back to the top of this list you'll see that all the folders are displaying the correct
totals. If you find any photos in this list that you want to keep whether they're in folders or
individual files you can simply drag and drop them into the photos app icon. When you do,
they become part of your library so you can then delete them from the downloads
folder. Now I realize many of you may worry about accidentally importing duplicates in this process,
and trust me I get it! Sometimes when you're importing photos it will detect photos that are
duplicates, but it's not perfect. So here's the deal, if you do have a lot of duplicated photos
I encourage you to watch my video called "Goodbye Junk Photos," which covers removing duplicates and
a lot of other types of content that tends to clog up your photo library. Last but not least,
let's go over a few types of files that you can most likely trash to make this process easier
you'll want to sort everything by kind. Those files include .ICS files which are calendar
appointments. Zip and DMG files you can probably safely trash since DMG files are used to install
software and zip files when you double click on them open up and create a folder with the
contents. If you find any vCards, those contain contact information so if you double click on
them they will import into the contacts app automatically, but once that process is done,
you can safely trash them. If you enjoyed this tutorial please take a quick moment and click
the like button and if you haven't already done so please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thank
you so much for watching everyone, this is David A. Cox with Tech Talk America. Class Dismissed