Where does LM Studio store models on Mac? Can you delete them?

Where it is

What it is

LM Studio runs large language models locally on your Mac. Each model you download is saved as one or more large files in ~/.lmstudio/models, sorted into folders by publisher and model name. Older versions of LM Studio used ~/.cache/lm-studio/models, and the app lets you choose a different folder.

It grows every time you try a new model. Different sizes and quantizations of the same model are separate downloads, so it is easy to collect several copies of what is nearly the same thing.

Your chats are stored separately, in ~/.lmstudio/conversations, and deleting models does not remove them.

How big it gets

Each model is usually between a few GB and tens of GB, so a small collection can reach a hundred GB or more.

How to clear it by hand

1. Run the command below to see how much space each publisher's models take. It only reads sizes.
2. Open LM Studio and go to My Models. It lists every downloaded model with its size.
3. Delete the models you no longer use from that list.
4. If you would rather keep them on another drive, change the models folder in My Models and move the files there.

du -sh ~/.lmstudio/models/*

What happens afterwards

A deleted model disappears from LM Studio's list and cannot be loaded until you download it again. Chats that used it stay in your history.

How Diskzy handles it

Diskzy lists LM Studio models in the Clean up tab but leaves them unticked, because they would have to download again. System Data also shows AI models as their own named part.

Related guides

• Ollama models~/.ollama/models
• Hugging Face cache~/.cache/huggingface
• .cache~/.cache