Three ways to find large files on a Mac

When a Mac runs out of space, the fastest fix is finding the handful of files that take the most room. A single forgotten video export or disk image can be larger than a year of documents. macOS gives you a few ways to look, and each has a blind spot.

Finder search

Finder can search by file size.

1. Open a Finder window and press Command-F.
2. Click the Kind dropdown, choose Other, and enable File Size.
3. Set the condition to "is greater than" and enter a size, such as 500 MB.

Finder lists every matching file across the folder you searched. Sort by size to see the largest first.

The blind spot is that Finder searches files, not folders. A folder holding ten thousand 1 MB files takes 10 GB but never appears in the results. It also skips the contents of packages like Photos libraries.

Terminal

The du command sums up folder sizes, which fixes Finder's blind spot.

du -sh ~/* | sort -rh | head -20

This prints the twenty largest items in your home folder. Change the path to drill into a folder that looks big. For individual files, find works:

find ~ -type f -size +500M -exec ls -lh {} \; 2>/dev/null

Terminal is fast and thorough, but it shows one level at a time, and you have to keep typing paths to go deeper. It also cannot show you what a file is or open it for a look before you delete it.

A disk map

A disk map scans everything once and draws it. DiskDude's Treemap view shows every file and folder as a box sized by how much space it takes, so the largest items are the largest boxes, whether they are single files or folders full of small ones.

Click a box to zoom into that folder. Right-click any item to reveal it in Finder, preview it with Quick Look, or add it to Cleanup. The Top sizes view lists the 500 largest items as a plain table if you prefer a list to a picture.

A scan of a 256 GB home folder takes around ten seconds on an Apple silicon Mac, and results appear while the scan is still running.

Which one to use

• Finder when you know roughly what you are looking for and want a familiar window.
• Terminal when you are already there and want a quick number for one folder.
• A disk map when you do not know where the space went and want to see the whole drive at once.

Whichever you use, start at the top. Large items are rare, so finding the biggest five usually recovers more than deleting a hundred small ones.