How To Clean Up My Mac Computer For Free

Posted on

Spring comes with its own rituals. Here at Macworld, we like to throw open the windows, beat the dust out of the rugs, and straighten up our Mac desktops. Don’t stop at cleaning your home this season. Clean up your Mac. If you're using macOS Sierra, it has a feature that will help tremendously with your Spring cleaning: Optimize Storage. You can use Optimize Storage to activate the Store in iCloud option, remove iTunes videos you've watched (they can be re-downloaded), set it to empty the Trash automatically, reduce clutter caused by large files and downloads, and a lot more.

Optimize Storage is especially handy if you're using a Mac laptop with flash storage. You usually don't get the same amount of space as you would with a hard drive, so managing your space becomes more important. Beside Optimize Storage, there are other way to keep your Mac digitally clean. These tips from our editors will help you keep your Mac fresh and organized, whether you're using macOS Sierra or an older version of OS X. Tidy up your desktop Light Pillar Software Light Pillar’s wonderful app ($8; available on the; requires OS X 10.8 or later) is a handy utility that cleans up your Mac’s desktop, keeping it free of clutter.

How can the answer be improved?

It stores all desktop files and folders in a hidden Shadow Desktop, which you can access from the menu bar or in the Finder. That way, every file I download, each screenshot I capture, and every image I drag and drop to my desktop is stored and filed in an easy-to-reach location. The utility quietly works its magic at scheduled intervals—as often as every minute or as infrequently as every seven days. It even organizes desktop items by file type, which makes finding and renaming files easy. —Leah Yamshon ( ) Delete unnecessary disk images For most people, the Downloads folder is a dumping ground where files pile up in forgotten heaps. Go to the Downloads folder in the Finder and type disk image into the search box. Select Disk Image under the Kinds header.

100% Free Clean My Pc

Now, delete all of those downloaded DMG files that are just taking up space! —Jason Snell IDG Find all those leftover disk images in your Downloads folder and clean them out In macOS Sierra, there's another way to delete disk images. Go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac, then select Storage and click on the Manage button. In the Reduce Clutter section, click on the Review Files button. In the main window, click on Downloads and the click on the Kind header to sort by that particular type. To delete a disk image.

Click on it, and then click on the X button that appears. Empty out space-hogging Mail Downloads I get quite a few attachments via email—PDFs, ePub ebooks, Word documents, images, you name it. Most of the time I save those files to my desktop or my Downloads folder, but on occasion I make the mistake of double-clicking a file. When you do that, the document saves itself to your Mail Downloads folder, hidden away in your Library file.

Double-click enough files, and that folder can balloon in size. That’s why I make sure to check it and empty it every year or so. Adobe dng converter for mac os 10.5.

The easiest way I find to do this is to use Spotlight—press Command-Space to see a search field appear—and then type Mail Downloads. In the Folders section, you should see the Mail Downloads Data folder. If this isn’t working for you, try getting to it the long way.

Tune-up My Mac

Mac

In the Finder, select Go > Go to Folder. Type ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads in the text field. Click Go, and a Finder window will open showing the Mail Downloads folder.

How To Clean Up My Mac

IDG With a few stray clicks, the Mail Downloads folder can balloon in size, holding megabytes' worth of files you didn't even know were there. Once you get to the folder, you can select all files and delete, or rescue the few files you want to keep awhile in a more permanent location—say, the regular old Downloads folder. —Serenity Caldwell Keep a clean cache We’ve all heard “Empty your cache” as a web browser troubleshooting tip. As it turns out, a Mac stores a lot of information—not just browser-related details—in files called caches, allowing quick access to that data and reducing the need to fetch it from the original source again. Unfortunately, that information can sometimes become corrupted, or otherwise problematic. For example, you might end up looking at old data instead of the most current version of a website, or you may notice that a file’s icon doesn’t look quite right in the Finder. Maintain Maintain’s Cocktail utility can clear out your caches and perform a bunch of other maintenance tasks.