Free up storage
How to Find Files Over 5GB on Your Mac
Surface every file over 5GB on your Mac with Smart Folders, mdfind, and Terminal tricks. Spot the giant files quietly eating your SSD.
A 5GB file isn’t accidental. Nobody downloads 5GB of cat photos by mistake. When something on your Mac crosses that threshold, it’s almost always one of a small number of suspects: a video project, a virtual machine disk, a database export, a Photos library backup, or an installer that should’ve been trashed three years ago.
The good news is that hunting files over 5GB is faster than hunting files over 1GB. There are simply fewer of them. On a typical Mac with 500GB used, you’ll usually find between 8 and 25 files over 5GB — and clearing half of them frees more space than weeks of careful cache cleaning.
The quickest path: Smart Folder for 5GB+
Open Finder and press Cmd+N. Then File → New Smart Folder from the menu bar.
In the search bar, click “This Mac” so the search isn’t limited to the current folder. Click the + button on the right.
Change the dropdown that says “Kind” to “File Size.” Set it to “is greater than” and type 5 with the unit set to GB.
The results will populate as Spotlight finishes indexing. Click the Size column header to sort largest-first. Save the search to your sidebar so it’s always one click away.
Spotlight from the command line
mdfind queries the same index Spotlight uses, but from Terminal, where you can pipe and sort:
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 5368709120'
5,368,709,120 bytes equals 5GB exactly. To see results with sizes, combine with du:
mdfind 'kMDItemFSSize > 5368709120' | xargs -I {} du -h "{}" 2>/dev/null | sort -hr
That returns a sorted list with human-readable sizes. The biggest files appear first.
For the whole disk including system folders Spotlight might miss:
sudo find / -type f -size +5G 2>/dev/null
sudo lets find access folders that normally require permission. You’ll be asked for your account password. The 2>/dev/null part silences errors for folders even root can’t enter.
What 5GB+ files usually turn out to be
Rough breakdown from cleaning a few hundred Macs:
Virtual machine disk images dominate the list on developer Macs. Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion VMs routinely hit 60GB each. UTM disk images for Linux ARM VMs are smaller but still 8-15GB common.
Final Cut Pro libraries are the next biggest single offender. The library file looks like one item in Finder but is actually a package containing all your media, renders, and proxy files. Right-click and choose “Show Package Contents” to see what’s inside.
Logic Pro projects with bounce files can pass 5GB easily. Sample libraries from third-party plugins (Native Instruments, Spitfire) live in /Library/Application Support and stack up fast.
iPhone backups stored locally appear in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/. Each backup is a folder full of randomly named files that together hit 30-100GB depending on phone size.
Old macOS installers named “Install macOS Sonoma.app” or similar are 12-15GB each. They live in /Applications. Once you’ve installed the OS, the installer is dead weight.
Photos library backups — people often duplicate their Photos Library.photoslibrary to an external drive, then forget the backup is also on the internal SSD.
Time Machine local snapshots can add up to dozens of gigabytes invisible to Finder. They show as “Purgeable” space in Disk Utility.
Sorting by size in Finder column view
Switch any Finder window to List View with Cmd+2. If the Size column isn’t showing, right-click any column header and tick Size. Click Size to sort.
For folders to display real sizes, you have to enable it manually. Press Cmd+J for view options and check “Calculate all sizes.” On a packed drive this can take 60-120 seconds while Finder reads every folder, but afterward you can sort by size meaningfully.
Column View has a different superpower. Select any folder and press Cmd+I for Get Info. The “Size” line shows the total of everything inside, so you can drill down into folder trees by selecting parents and watching the number drop as you narrow in on the heavy hitters.
Going deeper with find flags
The find command has options that go beyond just size:
find ~ -type f -size +5G -mtime +180 2>/dev/null
This finds files over 5GB that haven’t been modified in over 180 days. Anything matching both is a strong deletion candidate — large and stale.
find ~ -type f -size +5G -atime +180 2>/dev/null
Same idea but using access time. Useful for media files that get edited rarely but viewed periodically.
find ~ -type f -size +5G -name "*.dmg" 2>/dev/null
Only DMG files over 5GB. Mostly turns up forgotten OS installers and large game downloads.
You can chain these:
find ~ -type f -size +5G \( -name "*.dmg" -o -name "*.pkg" -o -name "*.iso" \) 2>/dev/null
That returns disk images, packages, and ISOs — the trifecta of “stuff to install something” that shouldn’t still be around after install.
Decision-making for 5GB files
Once you have your list, the question isn’t “can I delete this?” but “do I have a copy somewhere else?”
For media files, check whether they’re in iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or on an external. If yes, the local copy is redundant.
For VMs, ask whether you’ve actually used the VM in the last 60 days. Most developers have 2-3 abandoned VMs from past projects taking 30+ GB each.
For project files (Final Cut, Logic, Photoshop), check the modification date. Projects you finished and shipped can move to an external or cloud archive.
For installers, just delete them. macOS installers are downloadable from System Settings → General → Software Update if you ever need them again. App installers can be redownloaded from the App Store or the developer’s site.
What “purgeable” complicates
When you check storage in System Settings → General → Storage, you’ll see a “Purgeable” category. This is files macOS could delete to free space — mostly Time Machine local snapshots, iCloud-offloadable files, and some app caches. Apple decides what’s purgeable based on your iCloud Drive settings and how much free space pressure exists.
The catch: a 5GB file might be entirely purgeable, partially purgeable, or not purgeable at all, and there’s no way to tell from Finder. If you’re cleaning to free space and macOS already considers something purgeable, you may not gain anything by deleting it manually.
To force macOS to release purgeable space, run:
tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999 4
That tells Time Machine to thin local snapshots aggressively. Keep this in mind when your “free space” doesn’t seem to grow after big deletions — the OS may have just reclaimed purgeable space and called it even.
Build the habit
Files over 5GB don’t appear continuously. They appear in clusters — when you start a new video project, install Parallels for the first time, or run a Time Machine backup that fails halfway through. Catching them within a few weeks of creation is much easier than discovering 30 of them at once when your drive hits 95%.
A monthly Smart Folder check or a quick scan with a cleaning tool keeps the list short. The Macs that fill up are the ones nobody’s looked at in a year.
Whichever method you use, focus your effort here first. Five files over 5GB will free more space than 5,000 cache files combined.