If you find your Mac's hard drive running out of space, you will probably need to find out which of the files on your hard drive are the biggest and thus need to be deleted. Many people will try to get you to download apps to do this, but as it turns out there is an easy, built-in way to list all of your files by file-size using the default search function. If you’ve never used these specific features of the Mac search function before, you’ll find it’s simple to do; just follow these steps to locate files and items based on their size.:
- From the Mac OS X Desktop, open any new Finder window
- Hit Command+F to bring up Search
- Click on “Kind” filter and select “Other”, then select “File Size” from the attribute list
- Click on the second filter and choose “is greater than”
- In the third space, enter the size to search for anything greater than (ex: 100) and choose either MB or GB as the final filter
The file and app list below will automatically update as anything larger than the specified file size is found on the hard drive. Be sure that “This Mac” is selected if you’re getting limited results, though you can also use the search limiters to find large files contained within single folders or user directories.
Want to use this feature to track down large files often? Click on the “Save” button in the upper right corner and you’ll turn the File Size search into a Smart Folder that can be easily accessed from the sidebar for easy future retrieval, plus that folder will constantly be updated with large files only, making it a very useful way to instantly find any big item laying around on a Mac.
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