The applications you have installed on your Mac are taking up space, of course. To do this, just Ctrl+click or right-click the Trash option in that specific application and select Empty Trash. For example, if you use iPhoto to manage your pictures and delete them in iPhoto, you’ll have to clear the iPhoto trash to remove them from your hard drive. If you’ve deleted media files from within these applications, you’ll need to empty their trash cans, too. IPhoto, iMovie, and Mail all have their own trash cans. This will delete all the files you sent to the trash from the Finder. To empty your user account’s main trash can, Ctrl-click or right-click the Trash icon at the bottom-right corner of the dock and select Empty Trash. But Macs can actually have multiple trash cans, so you may need to empty several. To completely remove these files and free up the space they require, you’ll have to empty your Trash.

Rather than permanently deleting files from within the Finder, they are sent to your Trash so you can restore them later if you change your mind. The Trash on a Mac is equivalent to the Recycle Bin on Windows. Note: before running any cleaning tool, you should make sure that all of your important data is backed up, just in case. If you don’t feel like spending a bunch of time to find and clean things up manually, you can use CleanMyMac X to get rid of temporary files, clean up extra language files, uninstall applications, get rid of extra files left behind by application uninstallations, find and get rid of big attachments stored in Mail, and a whole lot more.Īnd of course, there’s a free trial that shows where your free space has gone and lets you clean up some of it for free. How to Clear Up Disk Space On Your Mac the Easy Way If you fail to keep your Mac’s hard drive clean, you’re eventually going to get the dreaded “Your disk is almost full” error, so you may as well start now and clear up some space. Most of the wasted space on your Mac is only going to be reclaimed if you look at lot deeper-cleaning out language files, removing duplicate files, deleting attachments, clearing temporary files, or emptying all of the Trash cans. You can obviously free up disk space by simply doing a cursory find-and-delete for big files and other things that you’ve downloaded, but realistically that’s only going to get you so far. Here’s how to clean up your Mac’s hard disk and reclaim some drive space. Luckily there are quick and easy ways to free up disk space on your hard drive. Even these days, MacBooks still have tiny hard drives that fill up quickly.

How to clean up your mac hard drive