My Mac had 174 MB free… after deleting 200+ GB of videos.

MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 512GB SSD) slowed to an absolute crawl. Apps crashed. CapCut froze. Capto crashed. Finder struggled to breathe. Storage showed 94% full. I had already deleted almost every Capto recording, emptied the Trash, restarted the Mac, waited for Spotlight to index, and questioned my life choices. Still: 174 MB free. Not GB. MB.

I still had one giant 90 GB screen recording left to export. I assumed: 'Well obviously that's why.' Export it, watch hundreds of gigabytes come back, resume being a functional human with a functional laptop.

Wrong. After exporting the 90 GB file, still basically no free space. macOS reported Documents: 265 GB, System Data: 62 GB, Applications: 70 GB. The built-in Storage Manager wasn't helpful. The 'Large Files' tab? Empty. Downloads? Tiny. Unsupported Apps? Nothing. Classic edge case — storage was lying. Sort of.

1. 01Deleting almost every Capto recording.
2. 02Emptying the Trash.
3. 03Restarting the Mac.
4. 04Waiting for Spotlight to reindex.
5. 05Exporting the last 90 GB screen recording, assuming that was the culprit.
6. 06Trusting the Storage Manager's Large Files / Downloads / Unsupported Apps tabs.

System Settings → General → Storage → Documents → File Browser → Pictures. There it was: a 216 GB Capto Library hiding in plain sight. Not screenshots. Not exports. The actual Capto library package. Many creative apps (Capto, Photos, Final Cut, Logic, GarageBand) don't store projects as normal folders — they use a macOS package that looks like one file but is really a whole folder of originals, previews, cached media, thumbnails, and database files. Deleting recordings inside the app doesn't always shrink the package. I opened the Capto library, removed hundreds of gigabytes of recordings and cached media Capto had never reclaimed, and restarted. SSD usage dropped from 94% to 69%. Freed well over 100 GB. Moral: if your Mac storage doesn't make sense, don't trust the summary — dig into the package.