Storage CleanerWhere LM Studio stores models on Mac
LM Studio makes it easy to try models, and just as easy to end up with 100 GB of them. A 7–8B model is about 4–8 GB, a 27–32B model 16–20 GB, and 70B-class models 40 GB or more.
Where the models are
Current versions of LM Studio store models in:
~/.lmstudio/modelsOlder versions used ~/.cache/lm-studio/models. If you changed the location, LM Studio shows the current folder in the My Models tab. Inside, models are organised by publisher and model name, for example lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-GGUF/, with the .gguf files (or MLX folders) inside.
To see the biggest ones:
du -sh ~/.lmstudio/models/*/* | sort -hr | head -20How to delete a model
- Eject the model if it's loaded.
- In LM Studio, open My Models, click the … menu next to the model and choose Delete.
You can also move a model's folder to the Trash in Finder while LM Studio is closed. Unlike Ollama, LM Studio stores each model's files on their own, with no layers shared between models, so removing one folder doesn't affect other models.
Move models to an external drive
If you want to keep a large collection, move the models folder to an external SSD and point LM Studio at it from the models-directory setting in My Models. Loading from a fast USB or Thunderbolt SSD is fine; the model is read into memory once when it loads.
Rather see it all at once? Storage Cleaner scans for LM Studio, Ollama and Hugging Face models along with every other developer and AI hoard, shows when you last used each item, and cleans to the Trash with Undo. Scanning is free.
Try Storage Cleaner freeFrequently asked
Does uninstalling LM Studio delete the models? No. Dragging the app to the Trash leaves ~/.lmstudio behind. Delete that folder too if you want the space back.
I use Ollama as well. Are models shared? No, each tool keeps its own copy, so the same model downloaded in both takes twice the space. See how to delete Ollama models and the Hugging Face cache.