Apple hides the Library folder by setting a file system flag associated with the folder. You can toggle the visibility flag for any folder on your Mac; Apple just chose to set the Library folder's visibility flag to the off state by default. Here's how to change it.

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2012-11-9  The Library folder at the root level of your hard drive is a public ‘library’ of data that is required for all users of the Mac. The Library folder within the System folder is critical for the operation of your Mac. Don’t ever remove, rename or otherwise move this directory in any way. Leave it alone! 2020-4-1  Designate a System Photo Library in Photos If you have multiple photo libraries on your Mac, you can choose one to be the System Photo Library. The System Photo Library is the only library that can be used with iCloud Photos, Shared Albums, and My Photo Stream. 2020-4-6  For the most common example, novice Mac users might mistake the user Library folder for the System Library folder, and vice versa. Perhaps they think they’re trashing individual user files, but they’re actually trashing system level files – something that can happen if someone is attempting to clean caches and temp files from Mac OS. Mac users often freak out when they look at the Storage settings in About This Mac and find that System storage takes up way more space than they think it should. However, if they wait a bit the storage meter will continue to calculate what takes up space and allocate it to iCloud Drive and other things. Even once this is done, a fairly large System storage amount can be accounted for. May 30, 2019 What is the Library folder on Mac? The Library folder In macOS is the system folder which keeps important support files, such as user account settings, preference files, containers, application scripts, caches, cookies, fonts and other service files. All these files help your Mac and applications to function as they should and work fast.

Mac users often freak out when they look at the Storage settings in About This Mac and find that System storage takes up way more space than they think it should. However, if they wait a bit the storage meter will continue to calculate what takes up space and allocate it to iCloud Drive and other things. Even once this is done, a fairly large System storage amount can be accounted for by looking at your System folder, system Library folder, and user Library folders.

Check out Why Is My Mac System Storage So Big? at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: This is a question I hear over and over again. Online, on the Apple discussion groups I get asked it. It's asked in other forums all over the place. Why does the system storage on my Mac take up so much space? If you go into About My Mac and then go to Storage, then go and look at the bar for System Storage, sometimes it can look alarmingly big. Well, I'm going to tell you why you probably see it as looking really big, why it's probably not as big as you think, and how to find out what really is taking up the space.First, looking here notice what happens when you first go to Storage. You'll see that you get a kind of general like used and not used. Then after a while it starts to divide up in sections. When it first does this System Storage looks huge. So in my case it's almost 90 GB. A lot of people make the mistake of stopping here. They figure something's wrong and they go to investigate it or not investigate it or complain or whatever. But what they don't do is they don't wait because it's still calculating. It's still going to try and figure some things out. It takes awhile.I'm showing you this in real time. So you can see now it's still not updating, it's still not updating. It's still just shows you that it's at 90 GB in System Storage and leaving you to guess what's wrong. I really think there should be a little message there stating still calculating or something like that. But if you wait long enough eventually it will begin to divide things out. What it's doing there is that it is looking in the system and library folders and it's figuring out what's inside there. If it finds something that belongs in another category it will move it to that other category. But it takes awhile. So if we wait long enough we will see it change.There, it just did. You can see it took a big chunk and it put it into iCloud Drive. So iCloud is actually accounting for a lot of what was previously seen as being System. The thing is that in one of the Library folders is an actual folder that can change the data for iCloud Drive files and other things. So it sees that as being part of the System folder. It reports that back. As it gets more information about what's in the System folder it says, ah I can break this out and put it in another category. Now even though 50 GB of System Storage is now allocated to iCloud Drive, 40 GB still seems too big, right. So you want to investigate. Now unfortunately if you go to Manage and you look you're just going to be told the same thing. There's a lot taken up by System Storage. But you have complete control to be able to look in the folders on your Mac and figure out what's what. So why not do that?Now I happen to know that System Storage is going to be in both the System folder and the Library folder. So the first place I want to look is at the computer level and look at the System folder and use Command i to get info and then see how big that is. Then do the same thing with the Library folder. Using that I can account for half of System Storage. But only half. So where is the other half? Well, there are two Library folders. There's a Library folder for the system and there's also a Library folder for each user. I go into my User Library folder and you can get to there by going to the Go menu. You won't see Library there initially but if you hold the Option key down on your keyboard the Library appears. You can go to the Library folder. Looking in the Library folder I can see that it's huge. Also I can see that there is a folder in there that is the iCloud Drive data I saw before. But also other folders that are taking up lots of space as well. I can look in those and get an idea of what it's being used for. It's being used for cache files. It's being used to cache my iCloud Photo Library so I have some of the photo images there. It's being used to cache files, being used to cache things for Safari. It all seems accounted for and it's all being really well used because I have this space on my drive so my Mac knows that it should use it to try to speed up my experience. If I was shorter on space so I didn't have much space on my drive it wouldn't use so much. But since I have that space it's using it very wisely to give me a better computing experience on my Mac. That accounts for all of the System Storage space. There's mystery there. It's all accounted for and it all makes sense.

Your Mac has a secret. Thousands of them in fact, in the form of hidden files and folders lurking on its hard drive or SSD. Don’t worry, though. These files and folders are all supposed to be there. In fact, many of them are essential.

Many of these files are in your Mac’s main Library folder or in the ~/Library folder, which is in your User folder. Both these Library folders are hidden, but inside them are folders and files that hold things like preferences for apps.

Wt library. In this article, we’ll tell you how you can view hidden files on your Mac and make your Library folder visible.

What are the hidden files on Mac?

The hidden files are a throwback to macOS’ Unix roots. In fact, the convention of naming them starting with a “.” comes from Unix. For that reason, you can’t use a “.” at the start of a regular file name, otherwise OS X will hide it.

The files themselves contain data like access rights and privileges for files and folders, application support files, and preferences.

There are a number of reasons files and folders are hidden. Mostly, though, it’s because they contain data critical to the smooth running of your Mac and that you shouldn’t interfere with. In addition, there’s no real reason for most users to see or access them. Also, if they were all visible, your Mac would look horribly cluttered.

How to view hidden files on Mac

Before you make your Mac show hidden files, it’s important to remember they’ve been hidden for a reason. The data they contain could cause havoc if you delete or alter it and don’t know what you’re doing.

If your goal in viewing, for example ~/Library is so you can manually delete application support files for a program you’ve uninstalled, consider using a dedicated uninstaller like CleanMyMac X. That will make it easy to remove all the files associated with an application with one click. You can download CleanMyMac X for free here.

CleanMyMac X will also allow you to get rid of all the hidden files you no longer need. Many of these files are created and used then not needed anymore. They just sit there clogging up your hard drive. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac, identifies this system junk and allows you to quickly and easily get rid of it, potentially several gigabytes of disk space.

If you still want to view hidden files on your Mac, you need to go to the Finder and do the following:

For example, if you search for an email message that you already have open and that message isn't displayed in the search results. How to use the tool.Download and open the.Follow the instructions.Note The tool searches for duplicate installations of Outlook. Cracked macbook screen cost.

1. Open a new Finder window and click on the name of your Mac under ‘Devices’ in the sidebar.
2. Click on Macintosh HD, or whatever you’ve called your startup drive if you’ve renamed it.
3. Press Command-Shift-. (period). You should now see lots of files and folders who’s name starts with “.” become visible.
4. To re-hide the files and folders, hold down Command-Shift-. again.

How to view your Mac’s ~/Library folder

There are a couple of methods for making your ~/Library folder visible. Here’s the simplest:

1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
2. Open a new Finder window and navigate to your user folder (Tip: if it’s not in the sidebar, go to the Finder menu, choose Preferences, click Sidebar and check the box next to your Home folder)
3. Click on the Go menu.
4. Hold down the Option (Alt) key.
5. You should see that in the dropdown menu, Library appears below Home. Click on it.

Alternatively, do this to view your Library folder:

1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
2. Click on the Go menu and choose Go to Folder.
3. In the window that opens, type “~/Library”

With both these methods, your Library folder will disappear again when you close the Finder window. It’s easy enough to run through the steps above again to make it visible again when you need to, but if you want it permanently accessible, there are a couple of ways to do it.

The quickest is to drag the Library folder to the Finder’s sidebar. That will create a shortcut to it that will persist. If you want to keep ~/Library visible but don’t want it clogging up the sidebar in Finder windows, do this:

1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
2. Click on the View menu and choose Show View Options.
3. Check the box labelled Show Library Folder at the bottom of the window.

How to make macOS show hidden files using Terminal

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If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can use the Terminal command line interface to view hidden files and folders. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Terminal from the Utilities folder in Applications, or by searching for it using Spotlight. You can also use the Go menu in the Finder to go directly to the Utilities folder.
2. Type, or copy and paste, this command: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true
3. Press Return
4. Type: killall Finder

To hide the files again, repeat the above steps, but replace ‘true’ with ‘false’ at the end of step 2.

How to hide any file or folder using Terminal

Now that you know how to view hidden files and folders on your Mac, you may be wondering how you can hide other files or folders, to keep them away from prying eyes. There are a number of third-party applications and utilities that offer to do this for you, but you can do it yourself in Terminal, like this:

1. Launch Terminal.
2. Type: chflags hidden
3. Press the spacebar.
4. Drag the file or folder you want to hide from the Finder onto the Terminal window.
5. You’ll see the path to the file or folder displayed in Terminal after the command you typed.
6. Hit Return to execute the command.

The file or folder you dragged onto the Terminal window will now be hidden. To see it again, use one of the methods described above to see hidden files.

To make the file visible permanently again, use the steps above, but in step 2 type: chflags nohidden

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As you can see, viewing hidden files and folders on your Mac is very straightforward. There are a number of ways to do it, and you can make them visible temporarily or permanently.

However, just because you can view hidden files, doesn’t mean you should — the files are usually hidden because accidentally deleting them or altering them could cause chaos on your Mac. So, while it’s fine to have a peek, don’t do anything with the hidden files unless you know what you’re doing.

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If you want to declutter your Mac or uninstall applications, use a dedicated application like CleanMyMac X. It will safely remove all useless files, add-ons, broken login items, caches, large and old files you didn't know about. Most likely, you won't even need to look for hidden files — CleanMyMac will do all the job for you.

We also showed that many of those files are stored in Library folders, including the one in your User folder, ~/Library. That folder is hidden by default, but you can view it or make it permanently visible using the techniques described above.

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