How to find large files on a Mac

Storage settings: the quickest list

1. Choose Apple menu → System Settings, click General in the sidebar, then Storage.
2. Click the info button next to Documents.
3. Click Large Files. Sort by Size, Kind or Last Accessed by clicking the column names.
4. Select a file and click Delete, or Show in Finder to see where it lives first.

Documents covers files in your home folder that no other category claims, so it is where old videos, disk images and exports turn up. File Browser in the same window shows how much each folder holds, which is the way in when the space is in a folder rather than one file. What Storage settings cannot list is System Data, which it only measures.

Finder: search by size

1. Open a Finder window and press Command-F.
2. Click This Mac, or your home folder's name, to choose where to search.
3. Click the first menu (it says Kind), choose Other, tick File Size, and click OK.
4. Set it to is greater than, type a size, and choose GB.

Switch to list view and sort by Size. Click the plus button to add a second rule, such as Last opened date set to before a date a year ago, to see only the large files you have not touched. Save the search, and it becomes a Smart Folder in the sidebar that stays up to date.

Terminal: everything over 1 GB

find ~ -type f -size +1G -exec du -h {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -h

This lists every file over 1 GB in your home folder with its size, largest last, including the hidden folders Finder does not search. Change +1G to +500M to go lower. macOS may ask whether Terminal can access your Desktop, Documents and Downloads folders; allow it, or the command skips them. It deletes nothing.

What usually turns up

• Videos and screen recordings in Movies, Desktop and Downloads. Keep them on an external drive if you want them but rarely watch them.
• Disk images and installers (.dmg, .pkg, Install macOS apps, iPhone restore images) for things already installed.
• Archives (.zip) you have already unpacked, beside the folder they unpacked to.
• Virtual machine and container disks, which are one file however much they hold. Remove them inside the app that made them; for Docker, see how to uninstall Docker on a Mac.
• Copies of the same file. Two lines with the same size and a similar name are worth opening side by side: the same video exported twice takes the space twice.

What to leave alone

• Anything inside a library. The Terminal command looks inside the Photos library, Music's media folder and app bundles too. A large file inside Photos Library.photoslibrary is a photo or video; delete it in Photos, never in Finder. See the Photos library is taking up space.
• Files under ~/Library you cannot identify. An app's database or a mail store can be one large file, and it is the only copy.
• iPhone backups. They are folders of many small files rather than one large one, and have their own page: how to delete old iPhone backups.

Move what you delete to the Trash rather than deleting it outright, and empty the Trash once you are sure. Until then nothing is freed.

Downloads is where most large files land: see how to find downloads on a Mac. To check whether two big files are copies of each other, see how to find duplicate files, and for what happens when you remove one, how to delete files on a Mac.

Where the app comes in

RefreshYourMac's Large Files category lists files over 200 MB in Downloads, Desktop, Documents and Movies, rated Review before deleting. What you clean goes to the Trash, or in the download edition you can use Move to… to put a file on another drive instead. In the Mac App Store edition, Downloads and Movies are included from the start and Desktop and Documents once you allow them in Settings → Folders. Installers and restore images have a category of their own, Installers & System Images, in the download edition, which says beside each whether it is already installed. For the other places worth checking, see how to free up space on a Mac.