Anyone who listens to a lot of podcasts knows that pretty soon, those sound files that you’re listening to can start taking up a lot of space on your iOS device. Today we’ll look at how to free up a lot of storage on your iPhone or iPad by managing podcasts in the iOS Podcasts app.

Use an app to clear your other storage. Use a third-party utility app designed to reclaim storage space. App and desktop program for Mac or Windows) is an app which can help remove these. Google Drive: Most files in your 'My Drive', including PDFs, images and videos. Items in your bin. Learn how to empty your bin. Note: Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Sites don't take up storage space. Gmail: Messages and attachments, including items in your spam and bin folders. Google Photos: Photos and videos stored in 'Original quality'.Learn how to change the size so that photos. Feb 03, 2020  Step 1: Download CleanMyMac and install the app on your Mac. Open it, under “Space Lens” module, first click the yellow “Grant Access” button to allow the app to access your Mac files and then select “Scan” to get started. Step 2: Soon it’ll show you a folder/file tree and you can hover your cursor over each block (i.e.

How Much Storage Is Being Used By Podcasts?
If you only subscribe to a handful of podcasts, you might not be using a lot of your device storage. On the other hand, even if you do only listen to a couple of podcasts, holding onto past episodes unnecessarily can fill up gigabytes of storage in a hurry. Let’s see how to find out how much space the Podcasts app is taking up.

May 26, 2020  When storage space is needed, only space-saving (optimized) versions of photos are kept on your Mac. To download the original photo or video, just open it. Store all messages and attachments in iCloud. When storage space is needed, only the messages and attachments you recently opened are kept on your Mac. Learn more about Messages in. Apr 15, 2019  Simply delete your Spotify app and then download it again. Once it has finished installing, it will produce fewer app caches. Clear Spotify Cache on Android. If you are an Android user, do the following to clear your Spotify app cache: Tap on Your Library (located in the menu on the bottom of the screen). Tap into Settings. Select Other. Jan 15, 2015  How to Clean Up “Other” Storage on a Mac. Generally speaking, the Other storage on a Mac is not something to overly concern yourself with unless you’re running low on disk space. If you do want to try and clean up the Other storage capacity in Mac OS, you’ll want to look in the following locations for data and files you no longer need. Aug 02, 2017  Go to albums- recently deleted - delete again. THAT didn't work. I found the fix in iCloud which I despise. I set it to NEVER store photos but it always resets and continues to store photos and clogs up everything. I assume it's so they can scare you into buying more storage. Don't fall for it. Got to iCloud and turn off storage for photos.

Launch Settings, then tap General > Storage & iCloud Usage, then tap on Manage Storage under the heading of Storage (iCloud storage is also listed). This page (screenshot below)shows how much space is used on your iOS device, how much is available, and then provides a list of storage usage by app.

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Here, the Podcasts app is taking up 171.5MB of storage. While that’s not a huge number considering that many new iOS devices have 64GB to 256GB of storage, it can make a big difference on devices that have 16GB or 32GB of storage.

Deleting An Entire Podcast
Perhaps you’ve grown tired of a podcast, it’s no longer being published, or you have found new source for your listening pleasure. It’s simple to delete an entire podcast and free up any space associated with it. Tap on the Podcasts button in the Storage list (seen above) to see information about the app and how much storage each podcast is using.

(Deleting a complete podcast with a swipe to the left and a tap on Delete.)

To delete a podcast from your list and free up all of the data associated with it, just swipe the podcast title to the left to expose the Delete button, then tap the Delete button (see image above). Alternatively, tapping the Edit button seen at upper right in the screenshot above displays a small delete button in front of each podcast, making it easy to go through a long list of podcasts to delete many quickly.

Set Episode Limits and Delete Played Episodes
Now that you’ve gained back some storage on your iOS device, perhaps you’d like to keep things “clean” automatically. The easiest way to do this is to not accumulate a lot of episodes of each podcast by setting episode limits and also by deleting those episodes you’ve listened to. Once again, this is done in Settings, not in the Podcasts app.

Launch Settings, then scroll down until you see the Podcasts button. Tap on it to view the variety of settings for Podcasts:

(Settings > Podcasts, and how to limit episodes.)

In the screenshot above and on the left, you see the various settings for the Podcasts app. Limiting the number of episodes on your iOS device can save space by clearing out old episodes when new ones are downloaded or listened to. On the screenshot above and on the right, you see that podcasts can be limited by the most recent episodes (most recent only or 2, 3, 5 or 10 most recent) or by time (day, week, two weeks, month).

The other way to clear storage is to automatically delete episodes that have been played. That’s done by tapping the Delete Played Episodes button (green means enabled). When enabled, podcast episodes are deleted 24 hours after you’ve listened to them. While this is useful for clearing storage, it can be frustrating if you’re the type who often likes to re-listen to an episode.

Clear Storage Space On Mac

The settings we’ve just looked at are default settings that are applied to any new podcasts that are subscribed to. What if you wish to give each podcast its own settings? In that case, launch the Podcasts app, tap on My Podcasts, then tap on the particular podcast you want to change settings for.

Next, tap the settings “gear” button (arrow in screenshot below, left):

(Changing settings for individual podcasts.)

What appears (right, above) are the settings for an individual podcast. Each of the default settings we saw in the earlier screenshot can now be customized for a podcast for which you’d like to keep more or less episodes.

Author’s Note: While I show the PodCacher podcast as an example of one I’m deleting, there’s no way I’d actually delete this excellent podcast about geocaching.

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So, your Mac is running out of storage. You try to figure out what’s taking up your disk space by clicking the Apple logo on the top-left of the screen, selecting About This Mac, and hitting the Storage tab.

To your surprise, you see a yellow bar representing “System” that seems to occupy way more space than you think it should. In the example above, it only shows 207 GB, but take a look at this Apple discussion — some Mac users report that System Storage takes an astonishing 250 GB.

Worse yet, you have no idea what’s included in “System” storage, because clicking the “Manage” button brings you to this System Information window… and the “System” row is greyed out.

Why does my Mac system require so much space?

What does it contain?

Is it safe to remove some of those system files?

How do I regain more storage space?

Questions like these may easily get to your head. Although my Mac now has a good amount of disk space available, I’m always wary of files that are taking up more space than they should.

I have no idea why “System” is greyed out while “Documents,” “System Junk,” “Trash,” etc. allow you to review the files based on size and type. My hunch is that Apple does this on purpose to prevent users from deleting system files that could lead to serious issues.

What Files Are Included in System Storage on Mac?

During my research, I found many people report that Apple counts iTunes backup files and app caches (e.g. Adobe video cache files) in the System category.

Since it’s greyed out and we are unable to click on that category for deeper analysis, we’ll have to use a third-party app to assist.

CleanMyMac X is perfect for this kind of analysis. Since I tested the app in our best Mac cleaner review, it immediately came to my head when I saw “System” was greyed out in Storage. Note that CleanMyMac isn’t freeware, but the new “Space Lens” feature is free to use and it allows you to scan your Macintosh HD, and then show you an in-depth overview of what’s taking up disk space on your Mac.

Step 1:Download CleanMyMac and install the app on your Mac. Open it, under “Space Lens” module, first click the yellow “Grant Access” button to allow the app to access your Mac files and then select “Scan” to get started.

Step 2: Soon it’ll show you a folder/file tree and you can hover your cursor over each block (i.e. a folder). There you can find more details. In this case, I clicked “System” folder to continue.

Step 3: The file breakdown below indicates that some Library and iOS Support files are the culprits.

The interesting part is that the System file size shown in CleanMyMac is much smaller than the size shown in System Information. This puzzles me and makes me believe that Apple definitely has counted some other files (not real system files) in the System category.

What are they? I have no clue, honestly. But as reported by other Mac users who experienced the same issue, they said Apple also considers app caches and iTunes backup files as System files.

Out of curiosity, I ran CleanMyMac again for a quick scan. That app found 13.92 GB in iTunes Junk. Further review revealed that the junk files are old iOS device backups, software updates, broken downloads, etc.

But even after adding this amount to the original system files returned by CleanMyMac X, the total size is still a bit less than what’s returned in System Information.

If cleaning the System Storage is still not enough to bring your Mac available disk space to a normal level (i.e. 20% or more), see below.

What Else Can I Do to Reclaim More Disk Space?

There are tons of ways out there. Here are a few of my favorites that should help you get back a decent amount of space quickly.

1. Sort all files by size and delete old large files.

Open Finder, go to Recents and look at the Size column. Click on it to sort all recent files by file size (from large to small). You’ll have a clear overview of what items are eating up a large amount of space, e.g. From 1 GB to 10 GB, and from 100 MB to 1 GB.

On my MacBook Pro, I found a few large videos that could be transferred to an external drive.

Note: If the Size column doesn’t show up, click on the Settings icon and select Arrange By > Size.

2. Remove duplicate files.

Don’t forget those duplicates and similar files! They can stack up without you being aware of it. Finding them is sometimes time-consuming. That’s what Gemini 2 is designed for. Simply select a few frequently used folders (e.g. Documents, Downloads, etc.) in the main zone of Gemini.

It then scans them and returns all the duplicate files that might be worth removing. Of course, it’s always a good practice to review them before doing so. You can also read more from our detailed Gemini review here.

Wrapping It Up

Ever since Apple introduced the Optimized Storage feature, Mac users got the option of saving space by storing content in the cloud. Apple also has several new tools that make it easy to find and remove unneeded files.

That bar under the Storage tab is beautiful. It does allow you to get a quick overview of what’s taking up the most space on our hard drive. However, it still lacks insights into the “System” category as it’s greyed out.

Hopefully, the guides above have helped you figure out the reasons you’ve got so much “System” data, and most importantly you’ve reclaimed some disk space — especially for new MacBooks pre-installed with flash storage — every gigabyte is precious!