How Unclutter cleans up your Mac

A five-step walkthrough of the cleanup flow. Total time: about two minutes.

1. 1

   Open Unclutter and run a Smart Scan

   Launch Unclutter and click 'Smart Scan'. Unclutter walks the directories macOS uses for caches, logs, temporary files, and orphaned application data. The scan is read-only — nothing is modified on disk until you approve it. Typical scans complete in 10–30 seconds on Apple Silicon Macs.

2. 2

   Review what was found

   Findings are grouped into four categories — Disk Cleanup, Cache Management, App Leftovers, and Smart Suggestions — and sorted by size descending. Expand any category to see the exact files involved, with paths and sizes. You can deselect any item before cleanup.

3. 3

   Pick what to clean

   By default, Unclutter pre-selects only the items macOS itself treats as safe to remove: cache files, log files, temporary files, and orphaned support files from uninstalled apps. You can deselect anything you want to keep, or expand the 'Advanced' section to opt into more aggressive cleanup.

4. 4

   Click Clean

   Unclutter moves selected items to the Trash by default (configurable to remove directly). You stay in control: a 14-day Time Machine snapshot, your Trash, and Unclutter's own undo log give you three ways to recover anything you didn't mean to remove.

5. 5

   Review the report

   After cleanup, Unclutter shows a summary: total space reclaimed, items removed by category, and an estimate of how much will be reclaimed again next month at the current rate of cache growth. Most users see 20–100 GB recovered on a first run.