How to Find Old App Installers (.dmg, .pkg) on Your Mac

Every Mac has them. The Slack installer DMG you downloaded in 2022. Three different versions of Zoom. The Adobe Creative Cloud installer that was 700MB. The Xcode command-line tools .pkg from when you set up your dev environment.

Each one is a few hundred megabytes to a couple gigabytes, and once an app is installed, the installer is dead weight. A typical Mac has 5-15GB of forgotten installer files in Downloads alone. Here’s how to find every one.

Smart Folder for installers

The fastest method is a saved Finder search.

Open Finder, choose File → New Smart Folder. Click “This Mac” so it searches everywhere.

Hit + and change Kind to “Disk Image.” That catches DMGs. Save this as one Smart Folder if you only care about DMGs.

For PKGs, you need a different approach because Finder treats them as “Installer Package.” Create a second Smart Folder, Kind = Installer Package.

Or build a single Smart Folder that catches both: Click + twice. Set the first criterion to Kind = Disk Image. Hold Option and the + button becomes ... — click that, and you can switch to “Any” matching. Set the second criterion to Kind = Installer Package.

Save it, sort by Size, and the heaviest installers float to the top.

Spotlight from Terminal

Spotlight has UTI (Uniform Type Identifier) classifications you can query directly:

mdfind 'kMDItemContentType == "com.apple.disk-image-udif"'

That’s the type for read-only DMGs (the most common kind). For other DMG variants:

mdfind 'kMDItemContentType == "com.apple.disk-image-udzo"'

For installer packages:

mdfind 'kMDItemContentType == "com.apple.installer-package"'

For everything (DMG + PKG):

mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "Disk Image" || kMDItemKind == "Installer Package"'

To see sizes:

mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "Disk Image" || kMDItemKind == "Installer Package"' | xargs -I {} du -h "{}" 2>/dev/null | sort -hr

The find approach

find searches by file extension, which catches everything regardless of UTI:

find ~ -type f \( -name "*.dmg" -o -name "*.pkg" -o -name "*.mpkg" \) 2>/dev/null

.mpkg is an older “meta-package” format Apple used for installers that bundled multiple .pkg files together. Rare today but still on some Macs.

For a sortable list:

find ~ -type f \( -name "*.dmg" -o -name "*.pkg" \) -exec du -h {} + 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head -30

Top 30 largest installers in your home folder.

Stack with age for the deletion no-brainers:

find ~ -type f \( -name "*.dmg" -o -name "*.pkg" \) -mtime +90 2>/dev/null

Installers older than 90 days. After three months, you’ve either installed it or you’re not going to.

Where installers hide

~/Downloads is the obvious one. 80% of installers are here.

~/Desktop for people who download to desktop. Same content, worse organization.

~/Documents for installers people consciously kept for some reason (“just in case”). Almost always redundant.

/Applications sometimes contains macOS installer apps named “Install macOS Sonoma.app” or similar. These are 12-15GB each. After installing the OS, they’re dead weight.

External drives plugged in long-term — the ones you forgot were external because they’re always connected. Old installers accumulate there too.

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate — System update downloads. macOS usually cleans these but occasionally leaves remnants.

Adobe-related folders — Adobe Creative Cloud caches installer payloads in a few locations. ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe and /Library/Application Support/Adobe both accumulate stuff.

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How to verify an installer is for an app you have

If you’re not sure whether to delete an old installer, the quickest check is whether the app is in /Applications.

Mount a DMG by double-clicking it. The mounted volume usually contains an .app bundle. Compare the version with what’s in /Applications:

defaults read /Applications/Slack.app/Contents/Info.plist CFBundleShortVersionString

That returns the installed app’s version string. If your installer DMG version is the same or older than what’s installed, the installer is redundant.

For PKGs, the question is different — PKGs run an installation process that may put files in many places. After install, the .pkg itself does nothing useful. Always safe to delete.

What’s safe to delete

Always safe:

• DMGs and PKGs older than 90 days where you have the app installed
• macOS installer apps in /Applications after the OS is installed
• Adobe installer caches (Adobe redownloads them as needed)
• Any installer for an app you no longer use

Probably safe:

• DMGs from apps with auto-update (most modern apps don’t need the original installer)
• Beta or test installers older than 30 days
• Driver installers for hardware you still use (the drivers are installed; the installer is gone)

Keep these:

• Installers for apps you’re not sure where to redownload (old, niche, or one-time-purchase)
• Custom enterprise installers your IT team gave you
• Installers for apps that are no longer being distributed (rare but real)

For apps from the App Store, redownload is one click and free. For apps from developer websites, the developer almost always has the latest version available. The only “lost forever” risk is for installers from sources that have gone dark — and even then, archive.org often has them.

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The macOS installer in /Applications

Worth its own mention. After you upgrade macOS, the installer app stays in /Applications. It’s named something like “Install macOS Sonoma.app” or “Install macOS Sequoia.app” and weighs 12-15GB.

You don’t need it. If you ever need to reinstall, macOS recovery handles it without the local installer. Or you can redownload from System Settings → General → Software Update.

To remove:

sudo rm -rf "/Applications/Install macOS Sonoma.app"

Replace the name with whatever your installer is actually called. The sudo is needed because the installer has system-level permissions.

Bulk deletion approach

For Downloads, the simplest bulk move:

1. Open ~/Downloads in Finder
2. Sort by Size
3. Switch to a date column and sort to surface old items
4. Cmd-click old DMGs and PKGs
5. Cmd-Delete to send to Trash

For more aggressive Terminal-based cleanup:

find ~/Downloads -type f \( -name "*.dmg" -o -name "*.pkg" \) -mtime +90 -delete 2>/dev/null

Deletes installers in Downloads older than 90 days. The -delete flag is permanent — files don’t go to Trash. Run with -print first to see what would be deleted.

A note on receipts

When you install a .pkg, macOS keeps a “receipt” of what was installed at /var/db/receipts/. These are small files (a few KB) that don’t need cleanup but you’ll see them if browsing system folders. Don’t delete these manually — they’re how macOS tracks installation state.

Building a habit

Installers don’t accumulate constantly — they appear when you install something and then sit. The natural cleanup point is right after install: extract the app, drag to /Applications, delete the DMG.

If you don’t have that habit yet, a quarterly sweep handles the backlog. Open the saved Smart Folder, sort by date, delete anything over 90 days old.

A cleaning tool can do this automatically — flagging installers as part of standard scans. The work disappears into a regular cleanup pass instead of being a separate chore.

Either way, installers are the lowest-stakes deletion category on a Mac. Every one of them was meant to be temporary. The fact that they’re still around just means nobody got around to throwing them out.