Running Clean on Mac

Hi. I'm new to Norton here, but not to Macs (about 27 years as a user).

In general it's not really advised to mess around cleaning stuff on a Mac system. It more often than not causes more issues than it solves. If you have a well organised setup, it should be unnecessary.

I certainly wouldn't let it mess around with the Photos library at all, I fell foul of that few years back, and corrupt my library, and lost years of work by using a 'cleaner' app. It is a bit of a fragile library, and should only be managed within Photos itself (the only app I'd suggest is Power Photos by FatCat Software). Also note that Apple are now introducing their own Duplicate detector for Photos in the latest OS releases this month.

Cleaning out the temporary files often only retrieves small amount of storage space, and it's only a temporary reprieve anyway, as everything will rebuild caches and temporary files again. Sometimes it will even slow your system down for a while as all your apps need to rebuild what you removed.

As a rule, any such operations should only be carried out as a problem solving process, and never as 'routine' maintenance.

My favourite tool for making this task easier is Onyx (a search will find it easily). It's basically a GUI for command line tools already built into the OS. Also have a look at EtreCheck, which will also advise on steps to take to solve issues.

Hope that helps.

Andy