Can i delete downloads mac

Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.

Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Susan J. Former Lifewire writer Susan J. Owens is a tech writer focused on AI, blockchain, and virtual machines. Updated on February 04, Tweet Share Email. Apple Macs iPad. There is no "undo" from this, so make sure this is what you want to do. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error.

Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. Tell us why! More from Lifewire. Program installers, compressed ZIP archives, document file types, and so on can quickly add up to the tens—or even hundreds—of gigabytes. Various native and third-party apps say Apple TV and Spotify allow you to download multimedia and other forms of content for offline access.

If you are close to running out of storage on the Mac , you can rely on multiple methods to delete downloads on your Mac and free up space fast.

We shall explore them in detail below. By default, all three major web browsers on the Mac Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox save files to a specially designated Downloads folder within your user account.

You can get to it immediately using Finder. Simply open a Finder window and select Downloads on the sidebar. If the option appears missing, select Go on the menu bar and pick the Downloads option instead. You should then see a list of browser downloads on the Mac.

Non-native apps may also use the same directory to save files e. That should make it easier to identify files that net the most space savings. To delete a file, control-click and select Move to Trash. Follow by emptying the Trash. To do that, control-click the Trash icon on the Dock and select Empty Trash. Whenever you perform a download on the internet, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox shall automatically keep a record of it. However, deleting the downloaded file using Finder does not remove the corresponding entry from your web browser.

If privacy is a concern, you must delete the download history separately. Open the View menu and select Show Downloads. Or, control-click and choose Remove from List to delete individual entries from the list. Open the Chrome menu and select Downloads. Should you want, you can delete entries individually by selecting the x -shaped icon next to each download. I recently went through the Downloads folder of my MacBook Air and found a few hundred photos and videos that were taking several gigabytes of space on my drive.

As it turns out, my wife had been downloading all these photos and videos without even realizing it. Rarely, I will find a file that I actually need, or will need in the future, so I just move it to a safe location in my Documents.

After deleting files from the Downloads folder, make sure to empty the Trash, or else the deleted files will still be on your computer, and still eating up storage space for nothing. At the end of the day, I see the Downloads folder as a temporary space where files sometimes get downloaded to.