Mac maintenance
Your Summer Mac Cleanup Routine
Summer is the perfect window to deep-clean your Mac. Here's a low-stakes June routine that frees 30+ GB and prepares you for fall.
Summer is the slowest stretch of the work calendar. Your inbox is calmer, your calendar is lighter, and the mental load of keeping projects in your head drops by half. It’s the best window of the year to spend an afternoon doing the maintenance you’ve been putting off since January.
Plus your Mac has been stewing for six months. The mid-year cleanup pays for itself in fall when work picks back up.
Why summer specifically
A few reasons this is the right moment:
- You can take a Mac offline for 90 minutes without anyone noticing
- Heat is a real problem in summer — a clean Mac runs cooler
- AC unit running, fans already loud — running disk-intensive cleanup is fine
- You’re more likely to take photos and videos in summer; storage gets eaten fast
- Back-to-school shopping and travel often mean accumulating files; start clean
The pre-summer cleanup makes the post-vacation file dump manageable.
Step 1: Survey the damage
Apple menu > About This Mac > More Info > Storage Settings. Wait for the bars to populate.
Note where you stand. If you cleaned in January, you’ll see how the past 6 months compare. If you’ve never done this before, prepare for some numbers.
Common state at mid-year on a Mac that hasn’t been cleaned in a while:
- Documents: 80–200 GB (probably fine, but worth pruning)
- System Data: 60–150 GB (this is your target)
- Apps: 40–80 GB (dump the ones you don’t use)
- Photos: variable, but often 100+ GB
- Trash: 1–10 GB (yes, really)
- Available: probably less than you’d like
Step 2: Photos cleanup (the summer-specific one)
Summer means a lot of photos. Vacations, BBQs, kids, pets in sunbeams. Before the avalanche, prune the existing library.
Open Photos. Look at:
- Bursts. That sequence of 12 nearly identical shots from a hike. Pick one, delete the rest. View > Show Burst Photos > select the burst > “Make a Selection” > keep one.
- Screenshots in Photos. Filter to Screenshots in the sidebar. Most of these can go.
- Duplicates. Photos has a built-in duplicate detector now. Look in the sidebar under Utilities > Duplicates.
- Recently Deleted. Empty it. Photos keeps deleted items 30 days, taking real space.
- Hidden album. Yes, that one. Audit it.
If you use iCloud Photos with “Optimize Mac Storage,” your local copies are downsized. If not, the full-resolution library lives on disk and grows fast. Turn on Optimize Storage in Photos > Settings > General if you’re tight on space.
Step 3: The big folder sweep
Same drill as any cleanup, but with summer-specific targets.
Downloads. Sort by Date Added. Anything from before March is fair game. Spring tax docs that should be in your Taxes archive go there now, not Downloads.
Desktop. Same. The pile of screenshots and one-off PDFs.
Old vacation photos sitting outside Photos. When you imported from a phone or camera last fall, did you also save copies to a folder somewhere? Find them, decide which library is canonical, dedupe the rest.
Last fiscal year’s work. Anything from 2024 that isn’t actively referenced — archive it. External drive, cloud cold storage, wherever. Off the laptop.
Browser downloads. Chrome’s downloads folder accumulates DMGs, ZIPs, and random crap. Trash it.
Step 4: Background apps audit
Heat is bigger in summer. Apps running silently in the background eat CPU and produce heat. Cut them.
System Settings > General > Login Items. Look at “Open at Login” and “Allow in the Background.”
Honestly look at each one. Question: “Do I need this running before I’ve even opened it?” Usually no.
Common stuff to disable:
- Spotify (launches when you click it; doesn’t need to run idle)
- Microsoft AutoUpdate
- Adobe Creative Cloud (unless you actively need notifications)
- Logitech, Razer, NVIDIA control panels
- Random helper apps from third-party hardware
- Cloud sync for accounts you don’t actively use
After cutting these, restart. Notice how much faster the Mac reaches a usable desktop.
Step 5: System Data deep dive
The gray bar in Storage Settings. Where 60–100 GB hides for most people.
The hits, in order of size:
iOS device backups. ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. Open it in Finder. Each subfolder is a phone backup. The phone you don’t own anymore is probably 60 GB. Drag those subfolders to Trash.
Xcode and developer tools. If you do any iOS development, Xcode > Settings > Locations > Derived Data > arrow to open in Finder > delete contents. Also ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices — old simulators are gigs each.
Time Machine local snapshots. Auto-managed mostly, but you can speed up purging by running tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / in Terminal (returns the dates of snapshots it removed).
App caches. Slack (~/Library/Application Support/Slack), Spotify (~/Library/Application Support/Spotify), Discord, Adobe apps. Each can be 5–20 GB.
Old log files. ~/Library/Logs and /private/var/log accumulate. Most apps don’t read old logs; you can delete with no impact.
Browser caches. Chrome alone is 5–10 GB after a few months. Clear via Settings > Privacy and security > Clear browsing data.
A cleanup tool finds all of these in one scan instead of you spelunking through Library folders. Way faster.
Step 6: Apps you stopped using
Open Applications folder in Finder. Sort by Date Last Opened (View > as List, then click Date Last Opened column).
Anything you haven’t opened in 4+ months is a candidate for removal. Be honest. The flexible budget app you tried in February? Gone. The screenshot annotator you replaced with another one? Gone.
Drag-to-Trash uninstall leaves leftover support files in ~/Library/Application Support, ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/Preferences, and elsewhere. A real uninstaller catches all of those. The leftovers can add up to 1–2 GB per app.
Step 7: Mail attachment purge
Mail caches attachments locally for offline access. After 6 months, this folder is huge.
Mail > Settings > Accounts > pick each account > Account Information > “Download Attachments” — change from All to Recent (last 30 days) or None. For All-set accounts, Mail will then redownload only when you open a message.
Then in Finder, Cmd+Shift+G, go to ~/Library/Mail. Note the size before and after a Mail restart. You’ll often see 10–30 GB drop after the change propagates.
Step 8: Verify backups
Before you delete tons of stuff, make sure you have a backup. Plug in your Time Machine drive. Apple menu > System Settings > General > Time Machine > Back Up Now.
If you don’t have a Time Machine backup, get one set up before deleting major files. Mistakes happen. Deleting your Photos library in a moment of overzealous cleanup is recoverable if and only if you have a backup.
iCloud Drive isn’t a backup — it’s sync. If you delete a file from iCloud Drive, it deletes everywhere. Same with Dropbox and Google Drive.
Step 9: Run the cleanup
Once you’ve manually handled the obvious stuff, run a tool to catch the rest. The categories that are hard to do manually:
- Cache files scattered across dozens of
~/Librarysubfolders - Log files in non-obvious locations
- App leftovers from years of installs/uninstalls
- Browser data spread across profiles
- Mail download caches
- Photo library temporary files
A scan-and-preview tool shows you what it found before deleting anything. You decide what to keep.
Step 10: Empty everything
After the cleanup, empty:
- Trash
- Photos > Recently Deleted
- Mail > Trash on each account
- Notes > Recently Deleted
Restart the Mac. macOS does cleanup on shutdown, often freeing another GB or two.
What summer cleanup gets you
A clean Mac at the start of July means:
- Vacation photos import without storage warnings
- Video calls don’t drop because of swap thrashing
- Macs runs cooler in summer heat (less background work)
- Faster startup for back-to-school in August
- Mental relief from knowing the digital clutter is gone
It’s an afternoon, once a year. The yearly version of the monthly cleanup. Worth it.