How to Clear CoreSpotlight Metadata on Mac When Taking Up Large Amounts of Storage

Spotlight is the powerful search engine built into MacOS that allows you to quickly find any file or data on your Mac disk drives. Part of what makes Spotlight so fast is that it uses caches and temporary files during indexing to quickly refer to data on your Mac, but sometimes those Spotlight files can take up unusually large amounts of disk storage space. Spotlight metadata consuming a very large amount of disk space can happen randomly and has been reported by many Mac users over time, and though some of these issues were first noticed during beta development of MacOS system software, the bloated Spotlight metadata issue has persisted for some users into the stable builds of MacOS, including Sequoia.

If you have discovered the CoreSpotlight folder on your Mac to be taking up huge amounts of disk storage, read along and you’ll learn how to clear out and recover that disk space quickly.

How to Clear Large CoreSpotlight Directory on Mac

Note that by removing the CoreSpotlight data from this directory, Spotlight may stop working for some files or data until the index is rebuilt.

1. From the Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up Go To Folder, or go to the Go menu and choose “Go to Folder”, then enter the following directory path:

~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/

2. You can delete anything in this directory, but often it’s the “SpotlightKnowledgeEvents” folder and “NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication” folder that is particularly bloated



3. Drag the disk hungry folders into the Trash and empty the Trash as usual to reclaim the disk space



4. Restart the Mac for good measure, or head to Terminal to rebuild the Spotlight index

In the screenshots here the CoreSpotlight metadata is a few GB, which isn’t terrible compared to many of the reports found online, as some users have reported 300GB or more of disk storage consumed by CoreSpotlight metadata bloat.

Spotlight has been finicky for some users with the latest versions of MacOS, and not long ago we had an article for fixing Spotlight issues in macOS Sequoia which includes rebuilding the index as well.

There are many reports of unusually large CoreSpotlight metadata folders, with people reporting these files taking up 300gb, 77gb, 150gb, and even if the total storage data isn’t too enormous sometimes there’s excessive disk writing going on which is bad for SSD health.

Have you noticed any issues with Spotlight caches and CoreSpotlight data taking up unusually large amounts of disk space on the Mac? Did you manually clear out the caches as shown here? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.