So Applications, of course, is where all your apps are stored and it's always going to be pretty big. For me it took a few minutes for the Applications' folder size to appear and a few minutes after that for the Users' folder to appear. Then we're going to wait for it to replace these dashes with actual numbers. Here there is an option called Calculate All Sizes. But you can force it to give you a size here by going to View, Show View Options, note this is Command J. Folders like Applications and System have tons of files in them. That's pretty hard to do because It has got to look at every file in that folder, figure out the file size, and add them all up.

It's not going to calculate the size of folders. You're going to see these little dashes here. I can adjust the columns to move them around. I'm going to click this button here and to go to List View. Now from this point we want to pay attention to what's taking up space. You're always going to see Applications, Library, System, and Users. I'll go into that and I'll see the main folders there. You can see I've got a couple of external drives but the drive I'm interested in is my main internal drive called Macintosh HD. We want to start at the top and start looking down at all the folders on our drive. Once we're there let's create a new Finder window. Let's start off by making sure we're in the Finder. It's pretty easy to figure out what's taking up space on your hard drive by just using the Finder. So on forums all over the internet I see Mac users asking how they can figure out what's taking up space on their hard drive and people answering with third party apps that you have to buy and install to figure it out. Join us and get exclusive content at /patreon. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a community of supporters. I'm going to show you how to find out what's taking up space on your hard drive without having to buy any third party apps.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with. Check out How To Figure Out What Is Taking Up Space On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

How to make space on mac hard drive