Decluttering Downloads

Client Notes

Last week, I assessed Jill’s Mac and determined that there’s no rush to replace it. Maybe in a few years. I also helped Monica to reestablish Apple Pay with her debit card and Ronna to download her financial transactions for household bookkeeping purposes.

Plus, I led a wonderful conversation among six clients as part of TEACH: Decluttering Downloads. Incredibly, we explored as much as double the content I might normally cover in a one-on-one of the same length.

I’m impressed by the learning possibilities of these workshops and I’ve pulled a few insights from this latest iteration:

1. TEACH workshops are a good venue to learn about a topic and begin to practice some new skills, but it’s unreasonable to assume you’ll be able to accomplish all of your goals in that domain
2. There’s a great variety of questions asked by different people, some that others wouldn’t think to ask, leading to an overall increase in the volume of material covered
3. There’s particular value in slowing down, patiently witnessing the computing experiences of others, and, in a new light, exploring tips and tactics that previously felt second nature

Why Do Downloads Accumulate?

You can easily open your Downloads folder in the Finder. Just look for Downloads on the sidebar of a Finder window, choose Go > Downloads, or press Command+Option+L.

I find many users accumulate files in their Downloads folder for at least one of three primary reasons:

1. They download email attachments from a webmail platform, like Gmail, often repeatedly because they don’t know where the file was saved
2. They don’t know what kinds of items can be deleted immediately after use
3. They use Save As to copy an item to a desired destination folder, leaving the original behind as a duplicate

Managing Email Downloads

Imagine you have PO box. You visit the post office, retrieve a large manila envelope, and find an important financial document and a letter describing it. You decide you can recycle the letter and want to keep the document in your filing system, but you end up leaving it in an inbox on your desk.

Many folks use website-based platforms like Gmail to read and manage email. I find these systems clumsy and inefficient, particularly for reasons John C. Dvorak wrote about in his 2016 PCMag article, How Google Can Fix Gmail. (Nine years hence, it seems Google still hasn’t gotten the message.)

In the above example, the PO box is like your webmail system and the inbox on your desk is your Downloads folder. How long does the document remain in the box until you file it?

When you use webmail, very few of the email attachments you open appear in the same window. Most, including Word and Excel documents, calendar invitations, photos, and compressed zip files first get saved to your Downloads folder.

You probably open them immediately, maybe using a button in your browser’s downloads list. However, unless you file them elsewhere, the saved files sit idle and disorganized on your Mac forevermore.

I regularly work with clients who use such webmail systems even though they use Apple Mail on their iPhone and/or iPad. As long as storage isn’t the reason for not using Mail on the Mac, I usually encourage and empower users to make this switch as well, resulting in a more consistent email experience across devices.

In Apple Mail, your email fully downloads to your Mac, attachments and all, so there’s no need to clutter your Downloads folder in the first place. You can simply file the attachments you want to save.

Plus, if you want to keep the body of an email but not the attachments, you can remove them alone and recover some storage on your email server. More on that in Email Attachment Theory.

Kinds of Items to Keep or Delete

There are a number of file types you likely accumulate in Downloads. Here’s an outline of some popular ones and how to decide what to do.

1. Productivity Documents: You likely want to keep final versions of documents made with Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in a known folder in your filing system. Otherwise, unless you’re savvy with search on your Mac, you may have trouble finding them again.
2. Calendar Invitations: These are .ics files that open with your calendar so you can keep track of an upcoming event. Once you open one and the event is on your calendar, you can delete the file.
3. Disk Images & Installer Packages: You usually download these to install software on your Mac. The next step is to drag an application to your Applications folder, open an installation app that handles this process, or open a package that uses the Installer app.
   With the latter, when the package was delivered on a disk image, Installer asks if you want to move the disk image to the trash, which you can confidently do. Otherwise, you can delete these after installing their contents.
4. PDFs: Like editable productivity documents, you may want to file these. Review on a case by case basis.
5. Photos & Videos: If you download media that were shared with you and you don’t have them in your Photos library, you may want to import them and can then delete from Downloads.
   If you exported media from your Photos library to share with others, then you may already have these and can delete them. Feel free to search for filenames in Photos and maybe also review Shared Albums for an alternate approach.
6. Zip Files: These archives often deliver multiple files and folders as a compressed bundle. Often, they get left behind after you expand and reveal their contents. If you can discover a zip with the same name as a folder, you can probably delete it.
   To prevent this in the future… Archive Utility is the default app that opens zips. In its settings, choose: After expanding, move archive to Trash.

Triage Downloads with Ease

Here are several tips for identifying and efficiently acting on downloads after consumption:

• View the Downloads folder as a List with Groups disabled. (See Coming Into View for help with this.) Then, you can easily sort by Size, Kind, or other metadata simply by clicking the column header.
• Use Quick Look (particularly “Advanced Navigation”) and the arrow keys to quickly triage items. Quick Look will show a preview of most of the documents and media on your Mac.
  Leave Quick Look on the screen as you step to each item — opening and closing folders as needed — and the preview will update to show the currently selected item. For items you want to delete, simply Command+Delete (Move to Trash).
• Use this Quick Look procedure to first delete items you don’t need. Then, file the rest.
• To move items to another folder, you can drag-and-drop within a single window using Spring-Loaded Folders, navigate to the destination in a second Finder window, or use the Move Item Here command. I offer support with the two latter methods in Are You a Finder or a Keeper?
• In some applications, there is a Move To command, as I discussed in Forgotten Mac Shortcuts. This way, you can move an item while it’s open. However, don’t confuse this with the Move command in Microsoft apps, which only works with Microsoft’s cloud storage platforms — not your local folders.
• Don’t use the Save As command as a substitute for moving an item. Inefficiently, you’ll leave the original behind as a duplicate and still have to go back and delete it.