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. 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. 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.

Oct 24, 2004. The file was corrupt and i tried to extract it a couple of times. When i was looking through my desktop folder through a program i have, it showed all these files that i cant see on the desktop: like.$$ Stuff. I have read that these are hidden files, but i have no idea how to delete them, they are taking up about. These files are hidden in OS X because they start with. And are therefore not shown in Finder by default. There is no special attribute set in these files apart from that. A very simplistic approach would be to delete all files that start with a dot and an underscore: find /Volumes/ -name '.

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.

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.

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. 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. Although you can manually go in and find some of OS X’s most commonly used cache directories ( ~/Library/Caches is a good place to start), plenty of tools will handle this job for you., from Maintain, is among the longest-running and best of these. Not only can it clear your caches, but it can also perform assorted other maintenance tasks, such as deleting your browser’s cookies, looking for corrupted preference files, rebuilding certain databases, and way more.

You can download it and use it for free for up to ten launches, but at $19, it’s a pretty good buy. —Dan Moren Purge unwanted apps Kumaran Vijayan Kumaran Vijayan’s AppTrap rounds up all the files associated with an app, so you can delete everything. As someone who reviews products for Macworld, I regularly try new apps and then delete them. For the most part, you can drag an app from the Applications folder to the Trash, but often an app creates folders and files outside of the app package and in various locations on the drive, which makes those files and folders difficult to find and toss out. For this reason, I use, a free utility that installs as a System Preference pane and runs in the background.

When you Trash an app, AppTrap finds all the associated files and folders and moves them to the Trash—there’s no need for you to find those files on your hard drive yourself. Sometimes, however, when your Mac is updating an app, you want to keep the associated files but discard the old app; AppTrap will ask if you want to leave the files (which you want to do) or move them to the Trash. You can find other, just-as-capable utilities that do the same thing, but I’ve used AppTrap for years, and it has never given me problems or affected my Mac’s performance. In macOS Sierra, you can also remove apps through the Optimize Storage feature. In the Apple menu, select About This Mac. Select Storage and click on the Manage button.

In the left section, select Applications. The main section of the window will show a list of your applications. Select the app you want to remove, and then click on the X button to remove it. One caveat with this method: Only apps downloaded from the App Store will have all its components removed. If you got an app outside of the App Store and use this method to uninstall it, all the components may not be removed.

Under the Kind header, you can see if an app was from the App Store or not. —Roman Loyola IDG In macOS Sierra, the Optimize Storage feature can be used to delete apps from the App Store that you new longer use Disinfect your grubby keyboard Choose an Apple-approved wipe, or just clean your keys gently with something alcohol-based. My ergonomic keyboard accumulates so much dust and crumbs that occasionally I have to turn it upside down and shake it just to get the keys to work. But a thorough cleaning, even just once a year, can knock away the grime and germs. Unplug your keyboard or, if it is wireless, remove its batteries. If you’re cleaning a laptop, shut it down and unplug it.

Blow the dust out from between the keys with a can of compressed air. To finish the job, all you need is a package of disinfecting wipes.

Apple recommends by brand name. The basic idea, however, is to wipe your keys gently with something alcohol-based. (Before you use a wipe, squeeze out any excess liquid.) As tempting as it might be when you’re feeling germophobic, do not use wipes with bleach, or spray everything with Lysol; you might damage the keyboard.

—Scholle Sawyer McFarland Editor’s note: This article originally posted on March 21, 2013. It has been updated to reflect the current version of macOS Sierra.

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, please see. If the display seems to be inaccurate, try. Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first: iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash In Photos: File ▹ Show Recently Deleted ▹ Delete All Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then restart the computer.

That will temporarily free up some space. According to, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation— not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of the data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space. When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make, which are backup copies of recently deleted files.

The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself.

If you followed bad advice to disable local snapshots by running a shell command, you may have ended up with a lot of data in the Other category. Ask for instructions in that case. See for some simple ways to free up storage space. A common waste of space is old iTunes backups of mobile devices. As illustrated in, select the Devices tab in the iTunes preferences window, select the backups you want to delete, and click Delete Backups. Keep at least one backup of each device that you still use.

You can more effectively use a tool such as (ODS) to explore the volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one. Note that ODS only works with OS X 10.8 or later.

Deleting files inside a photo or iTunes library will corrupt the library. Changes to such a library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files. Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps. ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root. Back up all data now.

Install the app in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running. Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.

Security execute-with-privileges /A*/OmniDiskSweeper.app/*/M*/* 2>&- Launch the built-in Terminal application in any one of the following ways: ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.) ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens. ☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name. Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V.

You'll be prompted for your login password. The application window will open behind other open windows.

When you scan a volume, the window will eventually show all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning. I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance. When you're done with the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Apr 6, 2016 2:22 PM. Apple Footer This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums.

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Most Mac users rely on Spotlight to search for files and folders. Well, this tool is convenient and a really good assistant in finding data when it`s disorganized. However, your Mac has thousands of useless hidden files that are out of your view and which take up much of your disk space. The OS X operating system keeps system files invisible and neither Spotlight nor Finder can show hidden files. Let`s see solutions to this issue.

Method 1 Show hidden files on Mac via Terminal 1. Open Terminal (find it in Launchpad or Finder->Applications->Utilities). Enter into the Terminal Window the next command: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true. Press ‘Return’ on your keyboard. Relaunch Terminal with by typing killall Finder.

Now you can see all hidden files. To hide the files again you need to copy and paste defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles false. Press ‘Return’. Then relaunch Finder by adding command killall Finder.

Method 2 Show hidden files on Mac with a special script 1. Open Script Editor (find it in Launchpad or Finder->Applications->Utilities) 2. Copy and paste the following instructions to Apple Script box set vis to do shell script “defaults read com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles” if vis = “0” then do shell script “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles 1” else do shell script “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles 0” end if tell application “Finder” to quit delay 1 tell application “Finder” to activate 3. Save the file as a program in any directory. Now get the newly created program and run it in Finder. It will change the file visibility automatically. Method 3 Show Hidden files on Mac with Funter There is a free app called for the OS X operating system that shows hidden files with one click.

With Funter you can show hidden files, find hidden files, copy, move or delete them easily and quickly. Here is how to use it step by step: 1.Download Funter. Launch the application.

Click the Funter icon in the menu bar and choose ‘Show Hidden Files’. After switching visibility your Finder will be relaunched and all hidden files will be visible. To hide hidden files again just switch off the file’s visibility with the same button. Conclusion The first two methods require a little time and manual labor. You can also write scripts in separate files, and run those commands. Here are we`ve prepared. Feel free to use them to switch a file’s visibility manually. Hex Rays Plw Google Maps more.

Nonetheless, we recommend using to hide and unhide files and folders. It is more convenient and easy to use. Moreover, Funter is preferable due to the ability to search for hidden files and.