How do you keep your Downloads folder from getting out of control?
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My Downloads folder has slowly turned into a mix of PDFs screenshots installers and random files I only needed once. I keep meaning to clean it up but doing it manually every few days gets annoying. I’d rather not pay for another cleanup app just for this. Are you using any built-in rules shortcuts or simple folder setup to automatically deal with old files?
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Sort by date added every friday delete everything older than 7 days. simple and brutal.
Promomix
My downloads folder is a straight-up graveyard of .dmg and random PDFs lol. need a fix asap.
windows storage sense does this out of the box. just set it to auto delete after 30 days.
Point downloads directly to Desktop. The visual mess forces you to clean it daily.
Just make one scratch subfolder inside downloads. anything in it gets deleted guilt free.
Built in Mac Folder Actions can auto trash installers older than a week. no paid app needed.
whats taking up the most space for you? mine is always single use setup files.
Turn on always ask where to save in browser settings. solves 90% of the clutter instantly.
Mid task the agent lost context and rebuilt a helper that was already there two files away, just with a different name. It buried the duplicate in Downloads). So now I treat the folder as a "scratch" disk and wipe it on every reboot so stale artifacts never get referenced again.
Stuff like this I just leave to Claude Code now. Tell it which files you actually want to keep and ask for a daily job that moves the rest into an archive folder once they're 30 days old. It'll write the script and schedule it with launchd for you.