Making space on the Mac

Geek alert: This post is a bit technical and I'm not telling you to delete stuff off your drive unless you are sure but you may find this post helpful.

I've been researching ways to make the mac faster by making more room on the hard drive. I have found a few goodies I'm going to share:

First, open up finder and right click on the hard drive (mine says Macintosh HD)
Select get info and look at "Available" Leave this window open so you can see what you're gaining in space.

1. Empty your trash. Right click on the trash can and select "empty trash" If you haven't done this in a while (or ever) you should gain a fair amount of space and speed.

2. If you use iPhoto, here's a tip. Open iPhoto and select the trash file on the left. Right click and empty that trash too. Apparently, it is separate from the main trash and doesn't get emptied at the same time. Big space saver for me! If you have multiple users, make sure they do it too.

3. iMovie projects and events take up a ridiculous amount of space. In finder, open your home drive (probably your name). Open the movies folder and you will see two files, iMovie projects and iMovie events. Right click and get info on these folders. You may be surprised to find they take up more than anything else. This is where it gets tricky. I found that one movie took up 7 GB. I'm now in the process of exporting movies via quick time and saving them elsewhere. Don't touch the movies from these files, you should work within iMovie to move events to another drive. DO YOUR RESEARCH. Don't start deleting without knowing what you're doing or don't blame me if you mess this up!

4. Downloads. It's another folder in your home folder. Open this up and see what's there. Every time you save something it gets saved here unless you tell it otherwise. If you find a lot of files that end in .dmg you may be able to delete them. These are application installation files, not the programs themselves. If you download and install an application, these .dmg files (disk image) files get left behind. Again DO YOUR RESEARCH but you may no longer need these if the application is in your Applications folder and working fine. You could always save these somewhere else if you're not sure.

5. Email. I get loads of photos from friends and family. I've been saving the ones I want to keep in my iPhoto. However, now they are taking up twice as much space, once in the email, and again in iPhoto. New habit. Delete the email after I save the photo.

Good luck. Hope these tips help.