Little Mac Apps

How to find large files on a Mac

By Little Mac Apps · Updated

Short answer: on macOS Ventura or later, open System Settings → General → Storage, click the Info button next to Documents, and look at Large Files. macOS lists big files and lets you sort them by size. To see whole folders as well as single files, use a disk space analyzer such as File Stacker. It draws every folder to scale, so the biggest things are the biggest blocks.

A single huge file is easy to spot. Disk space more often goes to a folder of thousands of medium-sized files: a photo export, a cache, an old project. Below are three built-in ways to find large files, then the File Stacker workflow, then what to check before you delete anything.

Find large files with what's built into macOS

1. Storage settings

  1. Choose Apple menu → System Settings, click General, then Storage.
  2. Wait for the bar at the top to finish calculating. It shows how much space each category uses.
  3. Click the Info button next to Documents. You can view large files or downloads, sort by name, kind, last accessed or size, and use File Browser to see how much space folders use.

On macOS Monterey (12), the same tools are under Apple menu → About This Mac → Storage → Manage.

  1. In Finder, press ⌘F and choose This Mac as the search location.
  2. Click the first pop-up menu (usually Kind), choose Other…, then select File Size.
  3. Set the rule to is greater than a size such as 1 GB.
  4. To keep the search, click Save. macOS stores it as a Smart Folder that updates by itself.

Finder search uses Spotlight's index, so it only finds files in places Spotlight has indexed, and it lists files, not folders.

3. Get Info for a single folder

Select a folder and press ⌘I to see its total size. This works for checking one folder, but it's slow for finding which folder is the problem.

Find large files with File Stacker

File Stacker is a disk space analyzer for Mac. It scans the folders you choose and shows them as a treemap: every rectangle is a file or folder, sized by how much disk space it uses.

Scan and read the map

  1. Open File Stacker and click Scan Home Folder…. In the folder picker, keep your Home folder selected and click Grant Access. The app is sandboxed, so it can read only the folders you grant.
  2. Look for the largest rectangles first. Colors show the kind of file; click a kind in the legend to highlight it.
  3. Click a folder to drill in. Press ⌘↑ to go back up a level.
  4. Click any item to see its size on disk, dates and largest contents in the inspector. Press Space for Quick Look.

Filter by size and age

  1. Click Filter and set Larger than to hide everything below a size.
  2. Add Not opened in to narrow the list to files you haven't touched for months.
  3. Type an extension such as .dmg, .zip or .mov in the search field to find every file of that kind.

To handle an item yourself, right-click it and choose Show in Finder.

Use Large & Old Files

  1. After a scan, open Large & Old Files in the sidebar.
  2. Set Larger than and Not opened in. The list updates as you change them, biggest first.
  3. Preview with Quick Look. To remove something, right-click and choose Move to Trash, or add several items to the Collector (⇧⌘C) and move them in one step.
  4. If you change your mind, open Recent Removals and click Put Back while the item is still in the Trash.

Where large files usually hide

Before you delete a large file

What File Stacker can't see

File Stacker scans only folders you grant. It can't measure everything macOS counts as “System Data”, because macOS keeps those locations off-limits to sandboxed apps. Some protected folders, such as Mail's data, appear with a lock and are marked incomplete rather than shown as empty.

Sources

Find duplicate filesIdentical vs. similar files, and which copy to keep. Clean up Xcode storageWhat each Xcode folder is for and what removing it does. File Stacker quick guideShort steps for every feature.