Free up storage
How to Find Files Older Than a Year on Your Mac
Find files on your Mac that haven't been opened or modified in over a year. Smart Folder, Spotlight, and Terminal commands for stale-file cleanup.
A file you haven’t touched in a year is rarely a file you’ll touch tomorrow. About 80% of what’s on a typical Mac falls into this bucket — old downloads, finished projects, screenshots from 2023, that PDF you saved for “later” reading 18 months ago.
Surfacing these stale files is the second-best storage cleanup move after finding the giant ones. Most aren’t huge individually, but together they can account for 100+ GB. Here’s how to find them precisely.
What “old” actually means on macOS
Files on a Mac have several timestamps, and which one you search by changes the results.
Date Created — When the file first appeared on this Mac. This is what most people picture when they think “old.”
Date Modified — When content last changed. A 2018 photo you cropped last week has a recent modified date.
Date Last Opened — When you (or any app) last accessed it. Often the most useful for “is this still in use?”
Date Added — When the file entered its current folder. Useful for tracking when something landed in Downloads.
For finding stale files, “Date Last Opened” is usually the right answer. A spreadsheet from 2020 you updated yesterday is current. A photo from yesterday you’ve never opened is probably already redundant with iCloud.
Smart Folder: stale files in Finder
Open Finder and choose File → New Smart Folder.
Click “This Mac” so the search isn’t limited to one folder. Hit + to add a criterion.
Click the dropdown that says “Kind” — by default the date options are limited. To unlock all the date options including “Date Last Opened,” hold Option while clicking and choose “Other…” Type “date” in the search and you’ll see all available date attributes. Pick “Date last opened.”
Set the dropdown to “is before” and enter a date one year ago. You can also use “within last” with values like 365 days, then invert the logic with the modifier.
Save the search to your sidebar. Now you have a permanent view of every file on your Mac that hasn’t been opened in a year.
Spotlight from Terminal: mdfind
Spotlight indexes the same date attributes:
mdfind 'kMDItemLastUsedDate < $time.now(-31536000)'
That finds files last opened more than a year ago (31,536,000 seconds = 1 year). For modification date instead:
mdfind 'kMDItemContentModificationDate < $time.now(-31536000)'
To narrow the search to your home folder:
mdfind -onlyin ~ 'kMDItemLastUsedDate < $time.now(-31536000)'
Combine with size for the deletion candidates that matter:
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 104857600 && kMDItemLastUsedDate < $time.now(-31536000)'
That returns files over 100MB that haven’t been opened in over a year. These are the highest-value targets — large and stale.
The find command for offline searching
mdfind depends on Spotlight indexing. find reads the filesystem directly:
find ~ -type f -atime +365 2>/dev/null
-atime +365 means “accessed more than 365 days ago.” Variants:
-mtime +365— modified-ctime +365— metadata changed (permissions, owner)-Btime +365— created (newer macOS only)
For a sortable list with sizes:
find ~ -type f -atime +365 -exec du -h {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head -100
Top 100 largest files not accessed in over a year.
Where stale files accumulate fastest
Some folders are stale-file factories. Check these first.
~/Downloads is the worst. Browser downloads, AirDrops you accepted and forgot, .pkg installers from 2022. Sort by Date Added — anything past a year old is almost certainly trash.
~/Desktop for people who use desktop as a temporary holding zone. Old screenshots, downloaded images, files dragged off as “I’ll deal with this later.” If your Desktop has more than 50 items, most are stale.
~/Documents holds finished projects. An old resume, college papers, that proposal for a job you didn’t get in 2021. These rarely take much space individually but add up.
~/Library/Caches — App caches that the app stopped using when you uninstalled it years ago. Subdirectories named after defunct apps are dead weight.
~/Library/Application Support — Same story but for app data. When you uninstall an app via drag-to-trash, this folder usually retains the support files. Some are several GB.
~/Movies — Old screen recordings, finished video projects, exported MP4s you posted somewhere and forgot about.
~/Pictures — Outside the Photos library, this often has random imports from old phones, memes saved from Slack, screenshots from work.
The two safest stale-file categories
If you want low-risk wins, focus here.
Old downloads. Almost nothing in Downloads needs to live there long-term. Files you wanted to keep should’ve been moved to a real folder. After a year, Downloads is pure cleanup territory.
Old screenshots. macOS saves screenshots to Desktop or your configured location. They tend to be 1-3MB each. A year of screenshots is often 5,000+ files and several gigabytes. Use a Smart Folder filtered by Kind: Image and date older than a year.
For both, the deletion is reversible (Trash holds them for 30 days) and the chance of needing them again is near zero.
What’s not safe even if it’s old
Some files stay relevant even when untouched for years.
Tax documents. Keep at least seven years.
Receipts and warranty info for expensive items.
Original photos that aren’t backed up elsewhere. Just because you haven’t opened a photo in two years doesn’t mean you don’t want it.
Source code for projects that might come back.
Software licenses, install keys, recovery codes.
Anything in /System or /Library (the root ones, not the user one).
Photos library files — even if Photos.app hasn’t been opened in months, the library is still your photo data.
When in doubt, move-to-archive instead of delete. Compress large stale folders into a .zip and store on an external drive or cloud. You free local space without losing the option to recover.
Combining age with size
The deletion candidates worth your time are large AND old. Small old files don’t matter — clearing 50,000 5KB files saves 250MB. Clearing five 5GB files saves 25GB.
A good Smart Folder for this combines two criteria:
- File Size is greater than 100 MB
- Date Last Opened is before [one year ago]
Save that. Anything matching both is worth at least a glance.
For really aggressive cleanup, push to two years. Files you haven’t touched in 24 months are essentially archived in place.
A note on browser caches and app data
Browsers and apps update their cache files constantly, even if you haven’t opened the app recently. So a Safari cache file might have a recent modification date even though you only used Safari last summer. Searching by date alone won’t surface these.
For caches, search by location instead. ~/Library/Caches and ~/Library/Containers/[app]/Data/Caches hold the bulk of them. Most apps clear their own caches on launch, so cache size at any moment reflects recent use, not stale data.
Building a quarterly habit
The fastest stale-file cleanup is the one that runs every three months instead of every three years. Set a reminder for the start of each quarter and walk through your saved Smart Folder.
Most people are shocked by what’s in there. Forgotten purchases, abandoned projects, redundant copies of files now in Dropbox. Twenty minutes of triage every quarter keeps your drive from ever filling up dramatically.
Or skip the manual review and let a cleaning tool surface the same list with size context attached, so the decisions go faster. Either way, stale files are where the easy wins live after you’ve cleaned the giants.