Choose Storage wait while it calculates.Click on the Apple logo in the top left.It's relatively easy to find, and here are the steps to gain a quick overview of what's on your Mac: The first thing you'll want to do is check your own Mac to see just how much space is currently occupied by the 'Other' folder. So if these aren't photos, videos, or music, what are they? They're a little of everything, but the easiest way to access this folder and solve this problem is to use a tool to clean up anything you don't need. Anything else that doesn't fit into the main macOS storage categories.Images and archives with file extensions.Documents like PDFs, Photoshop files, Word documents, etc.Cache files including browser cache, thumbnail cache, user cache, and system cache.System and/or temporary files for macOS.Random audio and video files are just two examples, but other files that don't easily fall into one specific category include: If macOS can't quickly label a file as video or audio, it usually falls into the Other category. Without getting too technical, the storage space containing the Other folder on Mac computers consists of several files that aren't easily distinguishable to the operating system. This folder could be clogging up your computer and slowing it down. As a user, you're likely unable to access this folder and empty it by yourself. Another option is to find, learn about, and manage a relatively unknown folder on every Mac computer named Other, which often occupies a substantial amount of space. You could try uploading photos and videos to your iCloud account and removing old videos or downloaded files. However, there could be something else in your Mac that's using up a lot of space that maybe you don't know about. The first step is to try to make space by looking for things to delete. That's not a situation anyone wants to face.

If you've enjoyed your Mac for a few years, you might not have that much GB sitting around freely available. Something as simple as updating to the latest macOS could take more than 50GB of space. It's a situation that's more likely if you have a 128GB or 256GB drive in your iMac, MacBook, Mac Pro, or Mac Mini.Įven business professionals with a 1TB Mac can quickly run into storage limitations.

However, if you don't manage your hard drive space, eventually, you'll run out of storage capacity on your device. Many of us love our Macs and are dependent on them for just about everything, from work, play, content creation, to storing photos and videos.

How to clear up space on mac hard drive