Help · Guides · Pangalin Space Manager
How to free up space safely.
Pangalin Space Manager splits what it finds into things that are safe to clean and things you should look at first. You see every item before anything happens, most of it goes to the Trash first, and a clean-up can be undone until you empty the Trash.
The quick way: the Dashboard
- Open Pangalin Space Manager. After the scan, the Dashboard says how much you can get back.
- Click Review and free …. It ticks only the safe items and opens the review sheet; nothing happens yet.
- Untick anything you want to keep, then click Clean up ….
Want to look first? Click See every item first, which opens Free Up Space.
Free Up Space, step by step
Choose Go › Free Up Space (⌘2). The list on the left has three groups:
- Safe to clean: Caches and the Trash. Caches are files apps make to run faster; apps rebuild them as you use them, so some of that space comes back over time. Pangalin Space Manager says how much.
- Review and decide: Installers, Temp files, Downloads, Large & old, Largest files, Duplicates, Similar and Snapshots. These can be important to you, so nothing here is ticked for you.
- More ways to free space: Cloud Drives, Shrink (compression), Apple Apps and Mail Data, shown when they hold something.
Two groups help with particular kinds of clutter:
- Projects:
node_modules, build output and Python environments in your code projects. They rebuild; your code stays. Click Add Projects Folder… to tell Pangalin Space Manager where your projects are. They're never part of the Dashboard's one-click clean-up. - Creative apps: caches that rebuild in their app, such as Lightroom previews, Final Cut render files and Logic Pro and GarageBand caches. None are ticked for you.
The Downloads group also shows how old your downloads are: this month, 1–6 months, and older than 6 months, which are usually installers you've already used.
- Click a group to see its items on the right, biggest first.
- Tick the items you want to clean. Rows marked Caution (orange) or Review (amber) are worth a second look: some Apple caches, such as photo analysis, take hours to rebuild.
- Not sure what something is? Select it and use Explain, if your Mac supports Apple Intelligence.
- Click Review and clean up … at the bottom.
The review sheet
Every item is listed again, and each row says exactly what will happen to it:
- cleared, rebuilds: cache contents are removed directly, because the app makes them again. Caches of apps that are open are skipped, and Pangalin Space Manager says which, so you can quit them and clear again.
- to Trash: everything else goes to the Trash first, so it's recoverable until you empty it
- removed for good: anything that's already in the Trash
Anything you've put on your Never Clean list, and files an open app is using, are listed under Left out — nothing here is touched, with the reason. Click a row's lock to protect it from this and every future clean-up.
Untick anything you want to keep, then click Clean up ….
“Skip the Trash — remove permanently now” is off by default. Leave it off unless you're sure: with it on, the space comes back straight away, but nothing can be recovered. When an action is permanent, its button says so in red.
Afterwards
- The finished sheet shows what was cleaned, how much is in the Trash and your free space before and after.
- Changed your mind? Choose Edit › Undo Move to Trash (⌥⌘Z) to put back what went to the Trash. Undo works while Pangalin Space Manager is open. After you quit, drag items out of the Trash back to where they were: Finder's Put Back isn't offered for files an app moves to the Trash, so check the action log in History (⌘7) for where each one came from. Cleared caches and permanent deletions can't be undone.
- Space in the Trash comes back when you empty it. Use Empty Trash now… on the finished sheet, or empty it later. Emptying the Trash is permanent.
Snapshots
Local Time Machine snapshots are restore points macOS keeps on your Mac and clears by itself: hourly ones after 24 hours, the one from your last backup when the space is needed. In Pangalin Space Manager they're listed under Snapshots in Free Up Space, and by date under Go › Apps (⌘4) › Backups, with All but newest, Thin snapshots… and Delete … selected…. It uses Apple's own tmutil, and macOS asks for your password. macOS can't report a size for each snapshot, so deleting them needs a licence rather than counting against your free 5 GB. Deleting a snapshot is permanent, and you can no longer roll back to that point. Backups on your external Time Machine drive aren't touched. See also Time Machine local snapshots.
Before a big clean-up
Keep a current backup, such as Time Machine, especially before emptying the Trash or deleting snapshots.
Related guides
- Your free 5 GB, explained
- Move big folders to an external drive
- Merge duplicates without deleting them
- Protect files with Never Clean
- Look around without changing anything
- “Your disk is almost full”: the manual checklist
Checked against Pangalin Space Manager 3.47.0, 10 October 2026. Screenshots from Pangalin Space Manager 3.48.0, 11 October 2026.