DiskBroomWhat it cleans › Where Ollama stores models (and how to remove them)

Cleaning guide

Ollama models: the quiet tens of gigabytes.

~/.ollama/models

What it is

Every model you ollama pull is stored as layer blobs under ~/.ollama/models. They stay after you stop using them — nothing expires on its own.

How big it gets

One 7–8B model at default quantization is roughly 4–5 GB; small models run ~1 GB and 70B-class models 40 GB+. A few experiments commonly add up to 10–50 GB.

What happens if you delete it

A removed model is gone until you re-download it — models don't regenerate, they re-pull. If you use it again, that's a multi-GB download; if you don't, the space is simply yours back.

How to remove it manually — free, no app needed

  1. See what you have: run ollama list in Terminal.
  2. Remove a model by name: ollama rm llama3.1 (repeat per model).
  3. Verify the space returned: du -sh ~/.ollama
  4. Removing everything? Quit Ollama, then delete the ~/.ollama folder — the next pull recreates it.

Risk rating

Worth a look. Deleting costs a re-download, not lost work — but the download is large, so glance at the list before sweeping.

Prefer not to do this by hand every time? DiskBroom scans this location (and every other one on its published list), shows the size, rates the risk with the same shape you see above, and asks before anything moves — everything goes to the Trash, never past it. Scanning is free forever.

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