Welcome back, in today’s video I’ll be showing you ten easy ways to free up space
on your Mac or MacBook.
Most of these methods should help give you extra drive space if you are close to or at
the limit.
The methods should work on any Mac or MacBook running macOS.
You don’t need to follow all of the methods to free up space, so feel free to skip some
if you have already done them or don’t think that they will work.
Before we start, please be careful when deleting things as I don’t want you to accidentally
remove anything you want to keep so always double check.
Remember to leave a like and feel free to subscribe if the video helps, let’s get
into the methods.
The first method to free up drive space on your Mac or MacBook is to remove any applications
that you don’t need or no longer use.
These could be apps, games or programs you can do without.
To remove applications you no longer use, head to the applications folder, you could
get there by using spotlight search and then find something you don’t use and then right
click, or control click on it and select move to trash or bin.
After this, enter your password or use Touch ID to confirm it is you.
You can restore items from the trash or bin by opening it and finding the item you want
to restore.
Right click or control click on it and then select put back.
This links nicely into method two, and that is to empty your bin or trash every so often.
Remember to check the bin or trash for items you may want to restore before doing this
though.
To empty the bin or trash, right click or control click on it and then select empty
trash or bin.
Let’s move onto the third method.
The third method to free up space on your macOS device is to use some of the tools in
macOS.
These settings are built in to macOS to try and help free up space and increase performance.
To do this, first head to the Apple icon in the top left and click on that.
Next, click on about this Mac from the list.
It should be at the top.
In here, go to the storage tab.
Now click on manage in the right of the window.
In here, you should notice a few options on the right.
You can pick and choose which options to run, for example you can optimize your storage
space or set it to empty the bin automatically.
Again, be careful as this may delete apps you want to keep, for example those in the
bin or trash.
Let’s move on to the next method.
The fourth method is to delete photos and videos you don’t need.
These kinds of files will take up a lot of space on your device and it’s good to look
through them to see if there are any you no longer need to keep.
Navigate to your photos or videos folder and simply go through it and choose the files
you don’t want, right click or control click on them and then choose send to bin or trash.
Remember to empty the bin or trash after deleting these to free up more space, just check again
though that you are happy to delete these items.
Let’s move onto method five.
The fifth method to free up space on your Mac or MacBook is to move files such as photos,
videos or projects to an external drive if you have one.
This would be a good idea for photos and videos you don’t want to delete, but don’t need
to access very often.
Plug in your external drive to a port and open it in finder.
You can then just drag and drop the files you want to store on this device from your
Mac and this should free up quite a lot of space depending on how much you transfer.
Let’s move onto the next method.
For the sixth method, we’re going to empty or sort the downloads folder.
It is likely that the downloads folder contains files, photos and more that we don’t need
to keep.
To get to your downloads folder open finder and the option called downloads should show
on the left side of the window, so click on that.
In your downloads folder, all you need to do is go through each item and either send
it to the bin or trash or move it to a more convenient folder.
If you have downloaded a lot of files, this should help free up a lot of space as you
shouldn’t need that many of the items in here.
Let’s move onto method seven.
Method seven is to search for files that take up a lot of space on your device.
These files might not be needed, and they may have been missed in some of the other
methods.
To search for large files, first open finder and then use the keyboard shortcut of command,
shift and H to go to the main home folder of your device.
Now use the keyboard shortcut command and the F key to begin a search.
You should now see that it is searching your Mac and the name will be whatever the name
of your device is.
Enter the search criteria at the top, for example by selecting the type to be an image
or video.
Now click on the plus icon to the right and click on the furthest left box of the new
criteria and choose other at the bottom.
Now search for file size and double click on it.
Select greater than and then enter a number, for example 100 and then choose MB for megabytes.
This will show all of the files that take up over 100 megabytes on your device from
any folder.
Select those you know you don’t need and send them to the bin or trash.
Let’s move onto the eighth method.
The eighth method to free up space on your device is similar to the last one.
This time we are going to identify the places and types of files that are taking up the
most space.
To do this, head to and click on the Apple icon in the top left and then choose about
this Mac from the list again, it should be at the top.
When the about this Mac window opens, click on storage and then wait a few moments whilst
it calculates the storage in the box.
This will now show you the amount of each type of file on your device which will allow
you to go back through and sort the sections that are taking up the most space.
You can hover over each section if you can’t see what it is called.
Let’s move onto method nine.
The next method is to install a cleaning app.
There will probably be a few different ones to choose from, so you may want to look up
which might be best for you.
They should have free versions available.
An example would be CCleaner, I’ll leave a link in the description if you want to get
it, but as I mentioned I would do some research to see which cleaner is best for you.
Cleaners will help automate some of the processes we have done up to this point, but as they
will take up some space themselves, they might not always be worth it.
Let’s move onto the final method.
The tenth and final method to free up space on your Mac or MacBook is to clear and clean
up your desktop.
Items stored on the desktop will take up space and also clutter the homepage.
All you need to do is look through the items on your desktop and delete those that you
know you don’t need.
To delete them right click, or control click on them and then select send to trash or bin.
Just check before deleting anything and you will probably need to empty the trash or bin
after doing this to free up some more space.
And so those are ten easy ways to free up space on your Mac or MacBook.
Hopefully some of them helped make a difference and you are no longer near the capacity of
your drive.
Click the card onscreen now to watch a video of mine showing you ten easy ways you can
speed up your macOS device.
We’ve already completed some of those methods in today’s video by freeing up system space,
so you should be able to zoom through that video.
Help support the channel by visiting the store – the link is in the description and at
the end of the video.
If you have any questions, then let me know in the comments below and if you did find
today’s video helpful remember to leave a like and feel free to subscribe for more
tips in the future.
Be sure to stick around to see some of my other videos that you might be interested
in.
Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in another video!