1. How To Find The Download Folder On Mac
2. Find Download Folder On Macbook Pro
3. How To Find Downloads Folder On Macbook Pro
4. How To Find Download Folder On Mac Dock Disappeared
5. How To Find The Download Folder On Mac
6. Can't Find Download Folder On Mac

The dreaded “running low on storage” error message — we all hate it. When your Mac starts to run out of space, one of the most effective ways to clean it up is to find any duplicate files you can delete. Photos, videos, songs, email attachments, old documents — anything that's easy to download and forget about.

Duplicate files on your Mac are largely useless, and managing them is important. The more duplicate files there are on Mac, the less efficient it is because duplicates can affect Mac’s resources and performance.

Many users just don't think to find duplicate files on their Mac, much less delete duplicate files when they're aware of them. There are a few really good ways to remove duplicate files on your Mac; we'll show you the absolute best methods here.

The most straightforward way to download images from Google Photos is one at a time, which you may find is the best approach. Simply open the photo you want to save, click the three dots in the. How to Access Downloads Folder on Mac from the Dock. The Downloads folder exists in the Dock of Mac OS by default, so unless it has been removed it will be there for all users to have quick access to by accessing the Dock at the bottom of the Mac screen. It will be located on the right side of the Dock near the Trash can. Jun 12, 2012 Mac / edit download folder safari, Find download folder Safari / June 12, 2012 March 24, 2014 Need some help figuring out where your Safari browser downloaded files to on your Mac OS X? Many Mac users find it is easy to download images files with their Safari browser, however it is difficult to find out where the downloaded files saved to on. These steps will return the Downloads folders into the Dock again in every version of Mac OS: Open the Finder in MacOS. Pull down the Finder “Go” menu and choose “Home”. Locate the “Downloads” folder in the Home directory, then click and drag on Downloads and drop it into the far-right side of the Dock (look for the faint line, it.

Duplicate file finder for Mac

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Best ways to remove duplicates on your Mac

Having duplicate files on your Mac may not be your fault. There are times when you duplicate a file to alter it, but never get around to those changes. You may also import images you already have in your Photos app, or have multiple video or audio files lurking.

Sometimes, apps download multiple files or folders they need to operate properly. You can dig through your file system and manually delete files, but that's a tedious process.

Find duplicates manually

How To Find The Download Folder On Mac

You can, of course, just go through every folder, hidden or not, and delete the files that you remember seeing somewhere else. But how long would that take you? Your files love to spread throughout multiple destinations, and some apps like iTunes or Photos keep their own libraries of your files, which are hard to get to.

Smart Folders can help. Your Mac lets you create Smart Folders inside Finder. These folders have automated actions to make finding file types easier.

Here's how to use Smart Folders on Mac:

1. Open Finder
2. From the menu bar, select “File”
3. Select “New Smart Folder”
4. In the finder window, choose “Kind”
5. Next to “Kind,” select the file type you want to isolate for the smart folder

This is Apple's imperfect method; it can help you find all types of files, but there's no automation for duplicates in Smart Folders. If you have multiple versions of a presentation, for example, Smart Folders can help you find all of your presentations, no matter where they're stored on your Mac. You can delete them in the Smart Folder, too, and those files will be placed in Trash.

Photos

You can also use Smart Folders to find duplicate images. Simply choose Kind > Image > and the type of image you want to find a duplicate of.

Downloads

Finder has a search field that can be handy for finding duplicate files. To use it for your Downloads folder, open Finder, and make sure you have the “Downloads” folder selected from the menu on the left side of the window. In the search bar on the top right, enter the name of a file you want to find a duplicate of.

Mail downloads

Your mail downloads have a home on your Mac. Again, this is likely your downloads folder; to make sure, go to your mail app, select its name in the menu bar, and choose “Preferences.” In its preferences menu, it allows you to designate where you want your downloads to go.

All you have to do from there is search the folder your mail downloads go to for duplicate files as noted above.

How to find duplicate files with a Terminal command

Before you start using Terminal, know this: any changes you make to Terminal and not reversible, and could have lasting effects on your Mac. Be careful!

Find Download Folder On Macbook Pro

To find duplicate files on Mac using Terminal, follow these steps:

1. Open Terminal on your Mac
2. Use the cd command to change directories.
   Note: If you have to change directories multiple times – say if you want to search a folder deeper in your file hierarchy – simply use the cd command multiple times until you reach your destination
3. Enter this command: find . -size 20 ! -type d -exec cksum {} ; | sort | tee /tmp/f.tmp | cut -f 1,2 -d ' ' | uniq -d | grep -hif – /tmp/f.tmp > duplicates.txt
4. Press 'Enter' on your Mac keyboard

This creates a text file of all your duplicate files in the folder you're searching for – but doesn't delete them! You still have to go looking for those files.

Get rid of duplicate files and folders with duplicate files finders

Just as with most maintenance tasks, finding duplicates has been automated for quite some time now. Apps like Gemini and Disk Drill are excellent duplicate file finder apps, able to scan your computer and clear out the excess completely in minutes.

Gemini is beyond easy to use. It's able to swiftly inspect your Mac, sort all the results by type or date, and even find similar files beyond just duplicates.

When you launch the Gemini app, it will prompt you to add a folder to scan. This can be any folder on your Mac, including common folders like your Home folder, Pictures folder, and Music folder, where your iTunes library lives. You can also drag and drop folders onto the Gemini window.

How To Find Downloads Folder On Macbook Pro

After Gemini finishes the scan, it'll show you how many duplicates it found and recommend which ones to automatically delete. You can click the Smart Cleanup button to delete the files that Gemini suggests or click Review Results to see all the duplicate files and make your own decisions.

The Review Results window contains everything you need to decide, too. For each duplicate file, you can see where each version lives on your hard drive when it was last modified, how large the file is, and of course preview it. The sidebar also distinguishes exact duplicates from files that are just very similar. You can sort any list by size or file type, and then check the boxes for any files you are comfortable deleting.

To see everything you have selected for deletion so far (including the choices Gemini made on your behalf), just click the Selected section in the left-hand sidebar. And when you're finished making selections, just click the Smart Cleanup button in the bottom-right and that's it! Gemini deletes your duplicate files and you're all done.

Disk Drill has similar functionality, and some extra features. The tool can recover deleted files that haven't been overwritten yet, salvage files from a corrupted external hard drive or SD card, and check the health of your main hard drive. Pretty useful, we think.

When you launch the app, click the Find Duplicates feature in the toolbar and add a folder for the app to scan. Your Home folder is a good place to start.

After the scan, Disk Drill will show all the duplicate files it has found. You can click the arrow next to any to see all the locations on your hard drive where that file was found and choose the one to delete. You can click a little magnifying glass icon to open the file's location in the Finder or click the eyeball to preview the file with Quick Look.

The app doesn't automatically select any files to delete, but has a few handy features. The default view puts the largest files on top of the list, but you can re-sort that however, you like. If you select all versions of the same file to delete, Disk Drill highlights that file name in red as an extra visual warning that you're about to delete them all.

Once you've made all your selections, just click the Remove button at the top-right of the window, confirm that you're really deleting them, and, poof, they're gone.

Conclusion

Finding duplicate files on your Mac can be tedious without great apps. That's likely why your memory is filled with duplicate files. It's also why most of us don't bother finding the duplicates to delete!

Gemini and Disk Drill making finding duplicate files really simple. Both have awesome features, and make finding and deleting duplicate files a snap.

All these apps are also part of the Setapp collection. In fact, there are about 200+ more useful apps for your Mac. And with a free trial, you can try these tips and free up space on our dime.

I’ve seen a lot of cluttered and disorganized Downloads folders on Mac. A lot. For me, at least, it’s much easier to keep my downloaded files cleaned up and organized if I download to my Desktop which I’m constantly looking at then to download to the downloads folder which I don’t pay attention to until it gets too cluttered to find anything.

So if you’re the same way, it’s good to know that you can change where Safari, Firefox, and Chrome automatically put their downloads.

So for today’s article, let’s go over how to change the default download folder on the Mac!

Luckily, the process of changing the default download directory pretty similar in the three main Mac browsers.

Change the Default Download Location in Safari

1. Open the Safari app and click on the Safari drop-down menu at the top left.
   
2. Choose Preferences.
3. Make sure General tab is selected and then change the File Download Location to wherever you want.
   

How To Find Download Folder On Mac Dock Disappeared

As you can see, I’ve got mine set to “Desktop,” but you can pick an alternate location with that “Other” choice. Clicking “Other” will bring you to the familiar macOS open/save dialog box, from which you can select any folder you want to use.
If you’re feeling really fancy, you could instead change that toggle shown in my second screenshot above to “Ask for each download,” which will mean that you can file away everything you download exactly where you want it to go, every time. While this is a nifty feature but it can get cumbersome to have to choose a download location for each and every download you do.

Change the Default Download Location in Firefox

With the Firefox browser, you’ll start the same way as you did with Safari.

1. Launch Firefox and click on its named menu(i.e. the FireFox pulldown menu) in the upper lefthand corner.
   
2. Select Preferences.
3. Under the General tab, at the label: Save files to click choose and select the folder you want your downloads to go to.
   

Again, the “Always ask me where to save files” radio button you see above will make Firefox ask you each time you initiate a download.

How To Find The Download Folder On Mac

Change the Default Download Location in Chrome

Google made it just a teeny bit harder to change your default downloads folder in the Chrome browser, but the steps begin the same way as the other two browsers.

Can't Find Download Folder On Mac

1. Launch Chrome and select the Chrome menu from the top of your screen.
2. Select Preferences.
   
3. Scroll down the settings on the side menu until you see Advanced. Click on it.
   
4. Choose Downloads.
   
5. Click on Change next to Location and select the folder you want your downloads to go to.
   

As with Safari and Firefox, there’s a choice to make the browser ask you where to put the file you’re downloading every time.
As Steve Jobs used to say, “Oh yeah, there’s one more thing.”

Mail also uses the Downloads folder to store attachments you save, so if you’d like to be really thorough, you could change that, too.

Click on the Mail pulldown menu at the top of Mail then select Preferences. Next, under the General tab, you can change the download location just as you can with the web browsers:
So now that you’ve got all of your browsers (and Mail!) set to do exactly what you need them to, you can go forward knowing that your Downloads folder will never get too cluttered and disorganized again. Getting things done is so much easier when you stay organized.

If you’re a Mac user and enjoyed this article, you might want to check out this TechJunkie article: How To Flush the DNS in Mac Mojave.

Do you have any tips or tricks for managing downloads on your Mac? If so, we’d love to hear from you in a comment below!