Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. How tos

How to delete files on a Chromebook

Add as a preferred source on Google
HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook top down view showing keyboard and touchpad.
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

Your Chromebook has quickly become your everyday computer. Using it for just about everything, including web browsing, word processing, gaming, and social media, we bet there’s going to come a time when you need to delete some files from your PC. Doing so will not only allow you to store more media locally, but it should also help to improve the performance of your go-to Chromebook device.

Recommended Videos

Difficulty

Easy

Duration

5 minutes

What You Need

  • Any Chromebook system

Deleting your Chromebook files is very easy, and we’ve put together this guide to help you through the process.

How to delete files via My Files

Step 1: Open My Files.

The My Files option on a Chromebook.
screenshot / Digital Trends

Step 2: Right-click on the file you want to remove from the system and select the Delete option.

It should be stressed that a Chromebook-based machine doesn’t have a recycle bin. As such, once you delete any file, it can’t be recovered and will be removed from the system completely.

Deleting a file or folder on a Chromebook.
screenshot / Digital Trends

How to delete images on Chromebook

If you’re attempting to delete images on Chromebook, it can only be achieved through a specific method. You won’t be able to delete them via the Images folder. Similarly, files from the Recent or Video folders cannot be deleted. Instead, locate them through My Files and delete them there.

Step 1: Open My Files.

Step 2: Now open the location the images were originally placed in. If it’s situated within the Downloads folder, open that and proceed to delete the image(s).

Deleting an image on a Chromebook.
screenshot / Digital Trends

How to delete downloads on Chromebook

As Chromebook systems don’t typically come with a huge amount of local storage space, files within the Download folder are subjected to automatic deletion if the system is running out of the space it needs to function.

As such, you may want to delete or back up certain files and folders in Downloads before that happens, or you simply may no longer have any use for those files.

Step 1: Select the My Files folder.

Step 2: Select Downloads.

Step 3: Choose the files and folders you want to remove from the system by right-clicking on them, and then choose the Delete option.

Deleting files from the Downloads folder on a Chromebook.
screenshot / Digital Trends

For more helpful guides on Chromebook, especially if you’re a new user to the ecosystem, then check out our tutorials on how to add, disable, and remove apps in Chrome OS, and how to zip and unzip files.

Zak Islam
Former Contributor
Zak covers the latest news in the technology world, particularly the computing field. A fan of anything pertaining to tech…
How to change the default apps on a Mac
Apple's default apps are great, until they're not. Here's how to swap them out in seconds.
change default apps on Mac featured image

One of my favorite things about macOS is that it comes with default apps to handle your everyday tasks. You get Safari to browse the web, the Mail app to handle your emails, and the Preview app to open and view photos and PDFs.

But what if you want to use a third-party app you prefer over the default app? Thankfully, Apple makes it easy to change the default apps on your Mac. So, whether you want to use Google Chrome or Outlook, here’s how you can set them as the default on your Mac. 

Read more
You can now choose how hard Claude thinks before answering your queries
For the first time, Claude users can decide whether their AI assistant thinks fast or thinks deep.
Page, Text, Business Card

Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.8, and while the benchmark improvements are quite real, the most meaningful change for everyday users is something far simpler. 

You can now tell Claude how hard to think before it responds to your query. Along with that, dynamic workflows are now available in research preview for Enterprise, Team, and Max plan users. 

Read more
Copilot gets a redesign and it now wants to do more without being an eyesore
Microslop Microsoft AI Copilot logo

Microsoft is giving Copilot a quiet but meaningful redesign, and this time the focus is not just on making it more powerful. It is about making it feel like something that naturally belongs in your workflow.

Across Microsoft 365, Copilot is being reshaped to reduce visual noise and increase usefulness. Instead of constantly demanding attention, it is being designed to sit in the background when needed and step forward only when it actually helps. That shift might sound subtle, but in day-to-day work, it changes how often you feel interrupted versus supported.

Read more