How to Find Large Files on Mac

Low on disk space and no idea where it went? macOS can point at the culprits itself, Finder can search by file size, and two Terminal commands will sweep your whole home folder. Here are the fastest ways to find large files on a Mac using nothing but built-in tools.

Check macOS's own storage breakdown

1. Open System Settings → General → Storage and give the colored bar a minute to finish calculating.
2. Click the ⓘ button next to the Documents category.
3. Open the Large Files tab. It's already sorted by size — select a file and click Show in Finder to inspect it, or Delete to remove it on the spot.

The Downloads and File Browser tabs in the same window deserve a pass too — File Browser is a size-sorted tree of your entire user folder, which makes bloated folders obvious at a glance.

While you're in the Storage pane, scan the whole category list. Big files don't only live in your folders: TV holds downloaded movies, Music holds downloads and local libraries, and iOS Files means old iPhone or iPad backups — each category has its own ⓘ button with a delete option. These are the gigabytes people forget they ever created.

Search by size in Finder

Finder's search can filter on file size, but the attribute is hidden by default:

1. In Finder, press Cmd-F.
2. Click the first criteria pop-up (it says Kind), choose Other…, and tick File Size.
3. Set the rule to File Size is greater than 500 MB, and make sure This Mac is selected as the search scope.

Click Save and Finder keeps the search as a Smart Folder in your sidebar — a live, always-current list of everything over your threshold.

Sort the usual folders by size

Three folders collect dead weight on almost every Mac: Downloads, Movies, and Desktop. In each one, switch to list view (Cmd-2), press Cmd-J to open View Options, and tick Calculate all sizes so folders report their true size. Then click the Size column header and the heaviest items rise to the top. Old screen recordings, disk images, and forgotten video exports usually dominate the first screen.

A second sort worth doing: add the Date Last Opened column in the same View Options window, and sort by that instead. A 4 GB file you haven't opened since 2023 is a much easier delete decision than one you used yesterday — size tells you what's worth reviewing, staleness tells you what's safe to let go.

Sweep with Terminal

# every file over 1 GB in your home folder
find ~ -type f -size +1G -exec ls -lh {} + 2>/dev/null

# your ten biggest top-level folders
du -sh ~/* 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head

The first command walks your home folder and prints a long listing for every file over a gigabyte; adjust +1G to +500M to widen the net. The second sizes each top-level folder, sorts largest-first, and shows the top ten — a thirty-second answer to "which folder is the problem?"

Both commands are read-only — they list, they don't delete, so there's nothing to undo. When you do remove something, drag it to the Trash rather than reaching for rm; that keeps the deletion reversible until you empty the Trash.

Big files found — duplicates next

Once the giants are gone, the next tier of wasted space is usually copies of the same file scattered across folders — smaller individually, but they add up fast. See how to find and delete duplicate files on a Mac.