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How to Properly Uninstall Adobe After Effects From Your Mac

After Effects leaves disk caches, plugins, and previews scattered across your Mac. Here's how to remove every file After Effects creates.

8 min read

After Effects has the worst disk-cache behavior of any Adobe app. It defaults to caching up to 30GB on your boot drive, and unlike Premiere, it doesn’t aggressively clean old project caches. I’ve seen After Effects disk caches sitting at 80GB on motion designers’ machines — full of frames from projects they finished and forgot two years ago.

Removing After Effects properly means clearing the disk cache, the conform cache, the preferences, the plugins, and the shared Adobe components. Drag-to-trash leaves all of it behind.

Where After Effects stores its data

After Effects on macOS Sonoma and later spreads files across:

  • App bundle at /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2024/
  • Disk cache at a location you set (default: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files/)
  • Conform cache in the same Media Cache folders
  • Preferences and workspaces in ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/24.0/
  • Plugins in /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2024/Plug-ins/ and ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe After Effects/24.0/Plug-ins/
  • Caches in ~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.AfterEffects/
  • Auto-saves in ~/Documents/Adobe/After Effects/Auto-Save/

The disk cache and conform cache live in the same shared Adobe folders Premiere uses. If you have both apps and only want to remove After Effects, you need to be careful not to break Premiere.

Open Activity Monitor. Search for “Adobe” and quit:

  1. Adobe After Effects
  2. AfterFX (the actual render engine, sometimes left running after a render)
  3. aerender (the headless renderer)
  4. Dynamic Link Manager
  5. Adobe Media Encoder (if running)
  6. Adobe QT32 Server
  7. The usual Adobe background processes (Core Sync, AdobeIPCBroker, AGSService, CCXProcess)

If aerender is in the middle of a render, let it finish. Force-quitting it can leave temp files.

Step 2: Use Creative Cloud’s uninstaller

The official route handles licensing and most components:

  1. Open Creative Cloud Desktop
  2. Find After Effects in your installed apps list
  3. Click the three dots → Uninstall
  4. Choose Yes when asked about removing preferences
  5. Wait for completion

The Creative Cloud uninstaller pulls the app bundle and most plugins. It doesn’t touch the disk cache, the conform cache, or about 60% of the user-level preferences and caches.

Let Sweep uninstall properlyDrag-to-trash leaves traces. Sweep wipes the app + support files + prefs + caches + helpers at once. Get Sweep free →

Step 3: Clear the disk cache (this is the big one)

After Effects’ disk cache is the largest single artifact you need to remove. Default location:

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files/

If you set a custom location (motion designers often use external SSDs for cache), check After Effects’ last preferences in ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/24.0/Adobe After Effects 24.0 Prefs.txt before deleting. The custom path is in there.

Once you know the location, you can delete the entire contents of that folder. After Effects regenerates the cache when needed, but with the app uninstalled, you don’t need any of it.

Tip: If you have Premiere Pro installed and want to keep its cache intact, don't blindly delete Media Cache Files/. Premiere uses the same folder. Instead, sort the folder by file extension — After Effects creates .cfa (conformed audio) and .pek (peak) files alongside cached frames. You can leave Premiere's CFAs and remove only AE-specific frames, but it's tedious. Most people just delete the whole folder and let both apps rebuild their caches.

Step 4: Remove user-level After Effects files

Hit Cmd+Shift+G in Finder and visit each path:

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe After Effects/24.0/ — workspaces, expressions library, scripts
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe After Effects Auto-Save/24.0/
  • ~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.AfterEffects/
  • ~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.AdobeAfterEffects.24/
  • ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/24.0/ — preferences, recent files, layouts
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.AfterEffects.plist
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.AfterEffectsHydra.plist
  • ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.adobe.AfterEffects.savedState/
  • ~/Library/Logs/Adobe/After Effects/
  • ~/Documents/Adobe/After Effects/Auto-Save/ — check for unfinished work first!

The auto-save folder in Documents is worth a manual look. If you have any half-finished comps, those auto-saves are recoverable copies.

Step 5: System-level Adobe cleanup

These require admin authentication:

  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe After Effects 24/ — system-wide AE components
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore/ — shared video plugins (only delete if no Premiere/AME)
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/HD Recorder/

If you’re keeping Premiere or Media Encoder, leave the Common/ folder alone.

Step 6: Third-party plugins

Motion designers often run a stack of plugins — Trapcode Suite, Element 3D, Saber, Plexus, Stardust. These install themselves into:

  • /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2024/Plug-ins/ — most third-party AE plugins land here
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe After Effects/24.0/Plug-ins/
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/After Effects 24/MediaCore/

When you delete the After Effects app bundle, plugins inside /Applications/Adobe After Effects 2024/Plug-ins/ go with it. But the user-level Plug-ins folder and the system-level MediaCore folder may still hold installer artifacts and licenses.

For Red Giant / Maxon plugins, run their dedicated uninstaller from /Applications/Maxon/. For Video Copilot products, check /Applications/VideoCopilot/.

Don’t dig through ~/Library yourselfSweep hunts every leftover an uninstaller misses. Free download for Mac →

Step 7: Launch agents and helpers

Like other Adobe apps, After Effects relies on shared agents. If you’re nuking all Adobe software:

  • /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist
  • /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.GC.AGM.plist
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2.plist
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.agsservice.plist
  • /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2

In Terminal:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.AdobeCreativeCloud.plist
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe.acc.installer.v2.plist

Then delete the plist files.

Step 8: Empty Trash and restart

A reboot is mandatory because some Adobe daemons hold open file handles. After login, verify Activity Monitor shows no Adobe processes.

Space recovery you can expect

A typical After Effects uninstall reclaims:

  • 4GB from the app bundle
  • 10-80GB from disk cache (depends entirely on your project history)
  • 2-5GB from third-party plugins
  • 1-2GB from preferences and other caches

Heavy AE users often see 30GB+ recovered. Light users with small projects might see 8GB.

Resetting After Effects without uninstalling

If your goal is to fix corruption rather than remove AE permanently:

  1. Quit After Effects
  2. Hold Cmd+Option+Shift while launching
  3. It prompts to reset preferences

For deeper resets, delete just the contents of ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/24.0/ and ~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.AfterEffects/. AE rebuilds these on next launch.

A note on render queue files

If After Effects was actively rendering when you uninstalled, check /var/folders/ for orphaned temp render files. Spotlight indexing won’t show these by default. They eventually get cleaned by macOS, but a reboot speeds it up.

Manual versus automated

The manual cleanup works but it’s a lot of folders to track. After Effects’ bundle IDs vary (com.adobe.AfterEffects, com.adobe.AdobeAfterEffects.24, com.adobe.AfterEffectsHydra), and missing one variant means files persist.

If you regularly install and remove Adobe apps, an automated tool earns its keep. Sweep handles the bundle ID variants, the shared component detection, and the disk cache identification in one pass. For a single uninstall, manual is fine — just don’t skip the disk cache step.

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