Final Cut, Logic, Premiere and Lightroom: what’s safe to delete on a creator’s Mac

If you edit video, make music or shoot photos on a Mac, a lot of your disk isn’t your work. It’s files your apps made from your work: render files, caches, previews, proxies and downloaded sounds. Most of it can go. Some of it can’t, and in the Finder the two look much the same.

This guide shows where each app keeps its big generated files and how to remove them with the app’s own commands. Menu names match Final Cut Pro 12.4, Logic Pro 12.3, GarageBand 10.4.14, Adobe’s current help pages for Premiere, After Effects and Lightroom Classic, and Photos on macOS Tahoe 26.

Three kinds of space

Before you delete anything, ask what it will cost to get it back. Everything here falls into one of three groups.

• Rebuilds itself. Safe to remove. The app recreates it from your originals, so the cost is time: rendering, re-caching and slower playback for a while.
• Re-downloadable. Safe to remove. It comes back from Apple or iCloud, so the cost is bandwidth and waiting.
• Losing this loses work. Your footage, recordings, photos, projects, catalogs and libraries. Never delete these to make room. If you need the space, move or archive them with the app’s own tools.

Use the app, not the Finder

Several of these files sit inside something that looks like a single file in the Finder: a Final Cut Pro library, your Photos library, Logic’s Logic Pro Library.bundle. These are packages, folders that the Finder shows as one item. You can open one with Show Package Contents and delete things inside it. Don’t.

Each app keeps its own record of what’s inside. A Final Cut Pro library tracks your media files, your edits and their metadata, and Adobe’s media cache has a database that links to every cached file. Delete files behind the app’s back and that record no longer matches what’s on disk. Apple’s Photos guide is direct about it: to avoid deleting or corrupting a photo library, don’t access or change its contents in the Finder.

An app’s own command knows which files are safe to remove and updates its records as it goes. Every step below uses one.

Final Cut Pro

The first time you open Final Cut Pro, it creates a library in your Movies folder. Media you import into a library is stored inside it (Apple calls this managed media), and by default so are the files Final Cut Pro generates: render files, optimized media and proxy media.

Delete render, optimized and proxy files

1. Select the library in the Libraries sidebar. To see how much space generated files use, choose File ▸ Library Properties (Control-Command-J) and scroll to Cache.
2. Choose File ▸ Delete Generated Library Files.
3. Select Delete Render Files, then choose unused or all render files. Select Delete Optimized Media and Delete Proxy Media too if you want those gone.
4. Click OK.

There are matching commands for events, projects and clips (Delete Generated Event Files and so on) if you only want to clear part of a library. Your original media isn’t touched. Final Cut Pro regenerates render files the next time you work on the project, but you have to recreate optimized and proxy media yourself. The library and clip versions of the command also delete generated files stored outside the library.

Unused render files build up as you change timelines and when you update Final Cut Pro, macOS or plug-ins, so clearing them now and then is a cheap habit.

Keep the cache on another drive

In Library Properties, click Modify Settings. The Cache menu sets where render files, analysis files, thumbnails and audio waveforms go. Choose a folder on another drive, and Final Cut Pro asks whether to move your existing render files there.

What not to delete

The library itself holds your edits and any managed media. If you imported media as external files, the library links to them where they are, and those folders are your originals. Both are in the third group.

Logic Pro and GarageBand

Logic’s sound packs

In Logic Pro 12, all the sound content lives in one file, Logic Pro Library.bundle, in your Music folder. Apple lists plug-in settings, channel strip settings, patches, Apple Loops and samples among its contents. The sound packs in it are re-downloadable.

1. Choose Logic Pro ▸ Sound Library.
2. Click Manage Packs in the upper-left corner. The total space used by installed packs is shown at the top, and each pack’s size is in the list.
3. Click Delete next to any pack you don’t use.

If a task needs a pack you’ve removed, Logic asks whether to download it. Don’t trash the whole bundle to save space: it holds more than the packs you downloaded.

Move the Sound Library instead

To keep every sound, move the library to another drive. In the Finder, drag Logic Pro Library.bundle (the whole file, never its contents) to the other drive. This is the one Finder step in this guide, and it’s Apple’s own method. Then choose Logic Pro ▸ Settings ▸ General, and under Sound Library click Locate and choose the bundle in its new place. Once the copy is on the other drive, you can delete the original from your Music folder.

If you upgraded to Logic Pro 12, Apple says the upgrade cloned your old library into the new bundle without using extra space on your Mac, and that you don’t have to delete the old sound library files to save space. Keep them if you still use an older version of Logic, which can’t read the new bundle.

GarageBand

GarageBand can fetch its sounds with GarageBand ▸ Sound Library ▸ Download All Available Sounds and repair them with Reinstall Sound Library, but Apple’s guide doesn’t describe a way to delete sounds from inside the app. For that, choose System Settings ▸ General ▸ Storage, open Music Creation, select an item and click Delete. That category lists GarageBand, Logic and MainStage content together, so check what each item is first.

Your Logic projects, GarageBand songs and anything you recorded are in the third group.

Premiere and After Effects

Adobe dropped “Pro” from Premiere’s name with version 26 in January 2026, and its menus now say Premiere.

Premiere’s media cache

When you import footage, Premiere writes cache files, such as conformed audio (.cfa) and peak (.pek) files, to speed up playback. By default they’re in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common, and the cache database is shared with After Effects and Media Encoder.

1. Choose Premiere ▸ Settings ▸ Media Cache.
2. Click Delete next to Remove Media Cache Files.
3. Choose Delete unused media cache files (files for source media Premiere can no longer find) or Delete all media cache files from the system. For the second, Adobe suggests restarting Premiere and doing it before you open a project.

Deleted cache files are recreated when the media needs them, so expect a slower first open on a big project. Under Media Cache Management in the same settings, you can have Premiere delete cache files older than a set number of days (90 by default) or once the cache passes a share of the drive (10% by default). Automatic deletion is off until you choose one.

Premiere’s preview files and proxies

Rendering a timeline creates preview files. With the Timeline panel active, choose Sequence ▸ Delete Render Files, or Sequence ▸ Delete Work Area Render Files for part of it. File ▸ Project Settings ▸ Scratch Disks shows where they’re stored. To get smooth playback back, re-render with Sequence ▸ Render In to Out.

Premiere doesn’t delete proxies for you. Right-click the clips in the Project panel and choose Proxy ▸ Detach Proxy. Adobe notes this leaves the files on disk, because another project might use them. Unless you chose a location, they’re in a folder named Proxies next to your original clips. Delete only that folder: your camera originals sit right beside it.

After Effects’ disk cache

After Effects saves rendered frames to a disk cache that it keeps between sessions. By default the cache can grow to 10% of the drive, up to 100 GB.

• Choose After Effects ▸ Settings ▸ Disk and click Empty Disk Cache, or choose Edit ▸ Purge ▸ All Memory & Disk Cache.
• In the same panel, Clean Database & Cache removes media cache files for footage whose source files are no longer available. Connect the drives with your current footage first, or After Effects treats that footage as missing and clears its cache too.
• Empty All Caches, under After Effects ▸ Settings ▸ Startup & Repair, clears the disk cache, media cache and database cache together.

Lightroom Classic

By default, Lightroom Classic keeps your catalog, Lightroom Catalog.lrcat, in ~/Pictures/Lightroom, with two large files beside it: Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata and Lightroom Catalog Smart Previews.lrdata. The catalog links to your original photos, which stay wherever you imported them. The catalog and the originals are in the third group. The previews are not.

Standard and 1:1 previews

Choose Library ▸ Previews ▸ Discard Standard and 1:1 Previews. Lightroom Classic recreates them when it needs them, so browsing is slower at first. The 1:1 previews are the big ones: in Lightroom Classic ▸ Catalog Settings, set Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews so they don’t pile up. Recent versions also let you cap the preview cache size there.

One catch: Adobe warns that previews of photos you’ve archived are lost too. Previews are drawn from the originals, so do this while your photo drives are connected.

Smart Previews

Smart Previews are smaller, lossy DNG stand-ins that let you edit while your originals are offline. Remove them with Library ▸ Previews ▸ Discard Smart Previews, and make them again with Library ▸ Previews ▸ Build Smart Previews.

Only discard them while your originals are connected. If the status under the Histogram says Smart Preview rather than Original + Smart Preview, Lightroom Classic can’t find the original, and the Smart Preview may be the only version you can work with.

Camera Raw cache

Choose Lightroom Classic ▸ Preferences, find Camera Raw Cache Settings and click Purge Cache. Adobe sets this cache to 5 GB by default. Only the Develop module uses it, and it fills again as you edit.

Apple Photos

Your Photos library is a package in your Pictures folder. If you use iCloud Photos, Photos can make room for you: choose Photos ▸ Settings, click iCloud and select Optimize Mac Storage. Photos then keeps smaller versions on your Mac when storage space is limited, with the full-size originals in iCloud, ready to download again. To bring them all back, select Download Originals to this Mac. iCloud Photos stores your whole library in iCloud, so you need iCloud storage for all of it.

If you don’t use iCloud Photos, the library on your Mac may be your only copy. Back it up, and leave it in the third group.

The short version

Clear what rebuilds itself with each app’s own command. Delete what’s re-downloadable when you can afford to fetch it again. Move or archive your libraries, catalogs, projects and originals, and never delete them to make room.

If you want to see where the space is going first, Disk Whisk shows what’s filling your Mac and explains each item, and anything you approve goes to the Trash.