Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me
show you how to manage iCloud storage on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a
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content and course discounts. You have a limited amount of iCloud storage
depending upon how much you pay for. How do you manage what's on there and know
if you're getting close to your limit. Well, on the Mac you would go to System Preferences
and then click on Apple ID at the top. Then look on the left for iCloud and click
that. Now at the bottom you're going to see a little graph here that shows you how
you're using iCloud storage. This is a demo account so I'm just using the free 5G. Here you
could see little areas for Photos and Videos, Documents, Messages, Mail, and then the
available space. But to get really detailed information click Manage. Now this is just going
to give you an overview of the things that you have on iCloud. It's not going to give you the
details you want but it's a good place to start. So here you can see very typical results where
the top two items are Photos and Other Documents. After all both Photos and Documents are large
files that take up a lot of space. So in this demo account I have 400 or so MB of Photos.Of course
in my real account I have many GB of photos. If I click here you don't really
get much additional information. You get that there are a 180 photos and 3
videos stored. All I can do is turn it off. To really see the photos I have
stored I would go to the Photos App. In here I could see at the bottom of All Photos it
shows me the same thing. 180 photos and 3 videos and this is where I can figure out what I've got
and if maybe there are things I can get rid of. I can look through and get rid of duplicates. I
can go to Media types here, for instance, and see things like videos which are typically going to be
a lot larger than photos and I can manage things. Now if say I wanted to clear some things off
I could through Photos and delete photos. One of the things I like to do to save space on
iCloud is to not store very many videos in my Photos Library. I like to leave my Photos Library
as just photos and I like to put videos just as files on my hard drive perhaps not even in iCloud
but stored locally or maybe in an external drive. Now back in System Preferences here Other
Documents is telling you basically about the files that you have stored in iCloud Drive. You
also have some other categories here below. For instance, I've got one here for Numbers, another
for Keynote. These aren't really any different than Other Documents. But if you look in the
Finder and you go to iCloud Drive you'll see you have a variety of folders here including your
Documents folder which is probably where you have most of your stuff. But there are also special
folders created for some apps like for Keynote. If I look in Keynote here I have a few files in
that special folder. You may not use that folder for anything or you may use it to store all your
Keynote files. It's really up to you. The same thing for Numbers. I have a bunch of Numbers files
stored in here, this being a demo account. I find it easy to save little demo Numbers files into
this folder. So now when I look here in System Preferences at say Numbers you could see it's
7.4 MB. That's equivalent to what's in this folder here. I have all of these files. If I do
Command A to select all and then Command Option I to bring up the Inspector you could see 7.8 MB
of files. So it's approximately the same amount just measured a little differently. However I
know I have other Numbers files that are stored in iCloud Drive in Documents. That number would
be a lot bigger if it was all Numbers files. So in looking at what's in Other Documents
mostly what you're going to see here should be the things that you've got inside
your Documents folder in iCloud Drive. If you want to manage what's in there then naturally you
would go into your Documents folder, look around, maybe archive some things you don't need, maybe
delete some files that you don't need anymore, and manage these files just like regular
files. Then getting rid of any of these would, of course, decrease the amount
of iCloud storage you're using. Now if you want to trim what documents you have
in iCloud Drive in the Finder go to iCloud Drive either by clicking on it in the left Sidebar
or using Go, iCloud Drive. Then here you'll see everything in iCloud Drive. Switch to List View
and now you'll see Size here on the right. It's usually blank. But if you choose View, Show View
Options or Command J, check Calculate All Sizes, you'll see Sizes now for each of those folders.
Sort By Size by clicking there and now I can see my Documents folder takes up the bulk of that.
I can expand the Documents folder and I can see what inside that takes up the most. So I can
see my Examples file folder is the largest. I can go down to that and see, oh yeah, I've got
a PhotoShop document that is taking up 38 MB of my 170 MB right there. So maybe that's something I
don't need anymore. Maybe I can Archive that. You just basically use this List View and keep digging
down into the different folders to see what you've got. It's pretty quick and easy to do and if you
seem to be using a lot more space than you thought this is a really quick way to get to the bottom of
it. Usually you'll see the files that are taking up the most space right away and you really get to
understand a little bit better what files you've got and what's taking up space and come up with
a strategy for maybe clearing some of that off. Now you're also going to see other
apps listed here like iMovie, Health, Shortcuts, Other 3rd Party Apps, Reminders. These
are all going to use some storage space to store their data. Typically these are going to be pretty
small so you're not going to worry about these. Obviously, if you really wanted to trim the
amount of data that Reminders was storing you would go into Reminders and delete old reminders
or ones you don't use or maybe even attachments that you've added to Reminders. But in most cases
if you're trying to cleanup your iCloud Storage you really wouldn't bother with these smaller
apps. The further you get down this list the smaller the numbers get and the less effect
cleaning up stuff in them is going to have. Now one thing I've got here is Messages. You
may see Messages all the way up near the top. I only have 9 MB in here in this demo account.
If I look in the Messages app you could see reason for those 9 MB is I've recently received
a couple of photo attachments. Since in Messages, in Preferences under iMessage, I've got enable
Messages in iCloud, it's using iCloud to sync my messages across all my devices. Which means
these photos, and any other attachments, are stored inside of iCloud. So if you have a lot
of photos then it's going to add up and Messages is going to take up a lot of space. There's no
real good way to get rid of these. You can select anyone and hit Delete and it will delete one of
these messages or the attachment. You can Control Click on it and select Delete as well to delete
a message. If you click on the i button here at the top and then you scroll down you could see
Photos and you could Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse, and
delete a single photo or attachment. But there's no good way to delete lots of them. One thing you
could do is in Messages, Preferences under General you can set Keep Messages instead of forever,
to only 30 days or One Year. So older messages will automatically get deleted. I know some people
like to keep their messages around forever though. But if you're using a lot of storage in Messages
you may want to create a new habit for yourself. That's when you receive a photo or attachment
from somebody after you view that message then maybe save it. You can see if I Control Click
on it I can actually add to my Photos Library, for instance, or I can drag and drop this out to
the Finder to Save it somewhere. Then delete it from Messages. It's not easy to do if you've got
thousands of these going back into the past. But if you start it as a habit now not to let photos
and attachments accumulate in the Messages app then you can really avoid having Messages just
take up a lot of space in your iCloud Storage. Another thing you may see here is Backups. Now
for me it's all the way at the bottom because I don't have any stored for this particular
account. But in my regular account I would see the Backup for my iPad and my iPhone here. This
is the iCloud Backup but it's one of the most useful things that you could do with iCloud
is to let it backup your iPhone and iPad. An iCloud Backup is so valuable
if your iPhone is lost or stolen. You can get a new one and pickup right where
you left off. So while you can select a backup here and use the minus button to delete it
it's not a good place to cut corners. You should let your devices backup to iCloud because
that's one of the best uses for iCloud Storage. Now if you're running out of storage space
here you want to click Buy More Storage. This is where you go to Upgrade your account. I know
a lot of people don't like to spend even $0.99 cents a month on a service but Macs are expensive
computers. iPhones are expensive iPhones and iPads are expensive tablets. If you want to get the most
out of them you really need to spend a little bit on iCloud Storage. Otherwise it's kind of like
getting a nice car but then refusing to ever drive it on the highway. You're not getting the most out
of it. Now I know a lot of people say they don't want to see aq $0.99 or $2.99 charge on my credit
card bill every month. No, you don't need to do that. You can go into Media & Purchases and Manage
your Account. It will go to the Mac App Store and in the area where you manage your account there
is a section for Add Money to Your Account. You can add money to your Apple Account in
increments here and it will deduct from that. So say you have the $2.99 plan and maybe every once
in awhile you rent a movie or buy an app you can add $50 or $100 to your account an it will just
keep pulling out of that. So it's kind of like having an annual plan but even better than that
since it covers other Apple purchases as well. So I hope you found this
useful. Thanks for watching.
