How do I find which folders are taking up space on a Mac?

Finder cannot do this well because its search only sees individual files. Use du -sh ~/* | sort -h in Terminal for one level at a time, or a disk mapping tool that draws the whole volume scaled by size. Note that du overcounts on APFS where files are cloned.

Why does Finder say a folder is bigger than the space I get back when I delete it?

Because Finder reports logical size, the sum of file lengths. On APFS, cloned files share their blocks on disk, so several files can each report their full size while together occupying one copy's worth of space. Deleting them only frees the blocks nothing else references.

Guides · August 2026

How to find large files on a Mac.

There are three good ways to do this and one of them is built into Finder, so start there. Press Cmd+F, set the search to your Mac, change the first filter to File Size, and set it to greater than 1 GB. That finds big individual files in about ten seconds. The harder question, and the one people usually actually have, is which folders are big, and that needs a different tool.

01 Finder, for single large files

Finder can do this and most people never find the option, because the size filter is hidden behind a dropdown that defaults to Kind.

Open a Finder window and press Cmd+F.
Click This Mac so you are not searching one folder.
Click the Kind dropdown in the filter row and choose Other. A long list appears. Search it for File Size, tick it, and click OK.
Set the row to File Size → is greater than → 1 → GB.
Switch to list view and click the Size column to sort. Add the column from View → Show View Options if it is missing.

This is genuinely useful for finding the forgotten 12 GB video export or the disk image you downloaded in March. Its limit is that it only sees files, so a folder holding 40,000 small files that add up to 80 GB is invisible to it. It also skips some system locations, which is usually what you want.

02 Terminal, if you like Terminal

Two commands cover almost everything. The first finds large files, the second finds large folders:

find ~ -type f -size +1G lists every file in your home folder over 1 GB. Add -exec ls -lh {} \; to see sizes alongside the paths.
du -sh ~/* | sort -h gives you the size of each top-level folder in your home directory, smallest to largest. Repeat it one level deeper on whatever came out biggest.
du -sh -d 1 ~/Library | sort -h is the one worth running on any Mac that feels mysteriously full, since Library is where the surprises live.

A warning about du on APFS. du counts allocated blocks per path, and it does not know that two cloned files share the same blocks. Run it across a folder tree full of clones and it will happily count the same physical bytes several times. If du says 87 GB and deleting frees 12 GB, this is why. We took the whole problem apart in Counting bytes on APFS.

03 The real question is folders

Almost nobody runs out of space because of one enormous file. They run out because of accumulation: a Photos library that grew for six years, a DerivedData folder nobody ever emptied, three old phone backups, a Downloads folder with 400 items in it. None of those is a big file. All of them are big folders.

Finder cannot show you this, and du can only show you one branch at a time while quietly overcounting. What you want is the whole volume at once, drawn to scale, so the answer is visible rather than deduced.

04 Mapping the whole disk

Delve draws every file and folder on the volume as a rectangle sized by the space it actually occupies. Big things are big boxes. You do not search, you look. Drill into a rectangle and it opens into its contents at the same scale, so you can go from "the disk is full" to "it is these two folders" in about fifteen seconds.

The part that matters for this particular job is that the numbers are honest. Clones and hardlinks are counted once rather than once per copy, and iCloud dataless files are marked so a 4 GB placeholder does not masquerade as 4 GB of local storage. So the size Delve shows next to a folder is the size you will get back when you delete it, which is not true of Finder's Get Info, and not true of du.

A 1 TB volume scans in well under two minutes on a base M2. It is native, it never sends your filesystem anywhere, and it is $4.99 once after a 14-day free trial.

Download Delve for macOS

If you would rather not pay for anything, GrandPerspective is free, open source, and draws a treemap too. It does not do the APFS accounting, but it costs nothing and we would rather tell you it exists.

05 Where the big folders usually are

Before you go hunting, these are worth checking directly. On most Macs the answer is in this list:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup, old iPhone and iPad backups. Frequently over 100 GB and almost always forgotten.
~/Library/Developer/Xcode, if you write code. DerivedData, device support, archives, and simulator runtimes. See our guide to clearing developer caches.
~/Library/Caches, everything from browser data to Adobe and Spotify. Safe to empty once the app is quit.
~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary. Large by nature. Turn on Optimise Mac Storage rather than deleting anything.
~/Downloads and the Desktop. Installers, disk images, and exports pile up here and are usually safe to clear.
Local Time Machine snapshots, which are not a folder you can browse. Our guide on System Data storage covers how to thin them.

06 Common questions

How do I find files over 1 GB on a Mac?

In Finder press Cmd+F, click This Mac, change the Kind dropdown to Other, add the File Size attribute, then set it to greater than 1 GB. In Terminal, find ~ -type f -size +1G does the same for your home folder.

How do I find which folders are taking up space?

Finder cannot do this well. Use du -sh ~/* | sort -h in Terminal for a single level, or a disk mapping tool that draws the whole volume by size. Note that du overcounts on APFS where files are cloned.

Why does Finder say a folder is bigger than the space I get back?

Because Finder reports logical size, the sum of file lengths. On APFS, cloned files share blocks on disk, so several files can report their full size while occupying one copy's worth of space. Deleting them only frees the blocks nothing else references.

Does Spotlight find large files?

Not directly from the menu bar search. The Finder search window uses the same index and does support a File Size filter, which is the practical way to use Spotlight for this.

What is the fastest way to find what is filling my Mac?

Map the volume visually. A treemap shows every folder scaled by the space it occupies, so the answer is a picture rather than a search. Delve does this in under two minutes for a 1 TB volume; GrandPerspective is a free alternative.

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