Hard disks inevitably fill up over time, and a higher capacity drive just means that you’ll find more ways to fill it. These days it’s possible to buy a MacBook Pro with a 750 GB hard disk, but even that can fill quickly if you have lots of media such as movies, music and photos. As an example, a typical 1 hour TV show downloaded in iTunes takes up around 1 GB, and so the entire 6 series of Lost takes up well over 100 Gigabytes on your hard disk. Besides upgrading to a larger disk, the easiest way to free up some space is to remove and archive some of the stuff that you don’t really need.

MacOS Sierra is a free upgrade and works on any Mac dating back to 2010, and on MacBooks and iMacs from 2009. Older hardware will still work with OS X 10.11 El Capitan, which you're probably using.

How to Check Available Disk Space To check how much space you are using for different categories such as audio, movies, photos and applications, select About This Mac from the Apple Menu, click the More Info button followed by the Storage tab. A summary of each category is shown, which may help you to decide how best to reclaim disk space. About This Mac shows how much space is available on your hard disk 1.

Empty The Trash The most obvious and easy way to free up some space is to empty the Trash. Remember that individual applications such as iMovie, iPhoto and Mail each have their own Trash, so empty those frequently too. There’s no need to keep your Mac’s Trash can full, especially if you make regular backups of your files. In Mail, trash and junk emails can be automatically deleted by setting the relevant options in preferences.

The best app to put effect motion in pictures for mac. Uninstall Unused Applications Applications can take up large amounts of space. For example, Pages is 266 MB and iPhoto a whopping 1.1 GB. Uninstalling applications in Mac OS X couldn’t be simpler – just delete the application by moving its icon to the Trash. In Lion it’s made even easier – open Launchpad and hold down the Option key until the icons wiggle, then just click the small white “x” icon that appears next to any app that was installed from the App Store. Note that there may be a few preferences files left behind by uninstalled apps, most of which can be found in the ~/ Library / Preferences folder and safely deleted.

Deleting unused applications is easy in Mac OS X 3. Find and Remove Large Files To find particularly large files on your Mac’s hard disk, the quickest way is to use Finder: • Open a new Finder window • In the search field just enter a space asterisk this will ensure that all items are included • Click on the little + icon located just below the search field • Change filter #1 to File Size.

Click on the drop-down menu and choose Other. Locate the File Size item and hit OK • Change filter #2 to is greater than • Enter the size you want to search for in the adjacent text field (for example 5 MB) and change filter #3 to either MB or GB as appropriate Finder displays all the files matching the criteria you’ve entered. You can also choose Save to create a smart folder of such items and add it to Finder’s sidebar, so you can find large files more quickly next time. When you’ve located the largest files on your Mac’s disk you might choose to compress, delete, or copy them to an external drive. Use Finder to locate large files 4.

Empty Application Caches and Preferences Some applications use caches to store various bits of information, but these files can grow very large over time and consume valuable disk space. A typical example is Safari which has an Internet cache to save it re-downloading content from frequently visited websites. Most applications store their caches in one of the following two folders: • The systemwide cache folder at // Macintosh HD / Library / Caches • Your local user’s cache folder at / Library / Caches Cache files can be safely deleted, because an application will just create a new one when needed. Empty application caches, such as the one in Safari 5. Delete Old and Unwanted Media Files Delete old media that you don’t want to keep Pruning your media libraries is a great way to save space.

Start by checking if there are any duplicates in iTunes (choose Display Duplicates from the File menu) and then delete any you don’t want. In iPhoto, keep only your best pictures and delete the ones that you really aren’t ever going to view again, or simply move them to an external disk or burn to DVD. In iTunes, create a smart playlist to show all the old content that you haven’t played in aeons (or items you’ve rated as 1 or 2 stars) and decide which ones to keep. Songs typically take up several megabytes each, so it’s possible to free up quite a lot of space this way. Use a smart playlist to locate old iTunes media files It’s also possible to use Finder to located old or particularly large media files.