The Mess We All Share

Every Mac user has some version of the same problem. The details differ, but it always goes the same way: files pile up faster than you can organize them, and by the time you notice, the mess is too big to deal with. ### A Developer's Mess If you write code for a living, your disk is full of stuff you never asked for. Xcode generates gigabytes of DerivedData for every project you build. Node.js leaves node_modules folders all over your filesystem. Docker images pile up, old .git repos from abandoned experiments stick around, and tools you tried once leave their build artifacts behind. You don't see any of this in Finder. One day you get the "Your disk is almost full" warning and have no idea where 80 GB went. ### A Photographer's Mess If you shoot photos, your mess looks completely different. You have RAW files with sidecar XMPs, and Lightroom preview caches that quietly grow to 20 GB. The same image gets exported several times (full resolution, web resolution, cropped, uncropped). Rejected shots never get deleted, and video clips from one session end up in three different folders. You know you should sort by date, by project or by format. But there are 40,000 files, and one Saturday isn't enough. ### Everyone's Downloads Folder Then there's the Downloads folder, which is basically everyone's junk drawer. It's full of PDFs you read once, installers you already ran, screenshots you shared and forgot about, zip files you extracted months ago, and duplicates ending in "(1)" because the browser didn't ask before downloading again. Every few months you open it, look at the mess, close it again, and tell yourself you'll deal with it later. ### Why Apple Storage Makes It Urgent Mac storage isn't cheap. You pay for every gigabyte up front, in the price of the machine. So when Apple warns you that your disk is full, you have to do something right away. You can buy a new machine, pay for iCloud, or spend a weekend cleaning up by hand. None of these are great. A new machine is expensive, and iCloud is a bill that keeps coming. Cleaning by hand is tedious, and three months later you're back where you started. ### What We Wanted We wanted a tool that can tell a developer's mess from a photographer's mess. It should know DerivedData is safe to delete and your .git folder isn't, and it should be able to tell a RAW file you're editing from a preview cache you forgot about. A simple rule like "delete files older than 30 days" can't do that, and a nicer disk usage chart doesn't help either. The tool has to understand what a file is, who it belongs to and whether it still matters. We also wanted it to keep an eye on your folders the way a good assistant would, putting things in the right place without you asking every time. You set a folder up once: how to sort it (by type, date, source or topic) and when (manually, daily at a set time, or as files arrive). If you tell it to leave something alone, it remembers that and won't move it on its own. People are comfortable with different amounts of automation. Some want everything sorted automatically, and some want to approve every move. The tool should work well for both, and neither group should feel like an afterthought. That's why we're building Mint: an app that understands what your files are and how you like to keep them. It started as a file organizer, and today it also helps you clean up your disk.