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…
Windows users can finally pick when updates stop with Microsoft’s latest patch
From pausing updates on your own schedule to rolling back a broken PC in one click, here's everything new in Windows 11's July 2026 update.
Windows 11 Laptop

Patch Tuesday updates are usually a shrug-and-install affair, but Microsoft's July 2026 release actually gives you something to be excited about.

You can grab this update, tagged KB5101650, right now through Settings, or manually via the Microsoft Update Catalog if you'd rather not wait for it to roll out.

Read more
Can AI audiobooks narrate better than humans? This study says many listeners think so
New study finds listeners favor AI narrated audiobooks over traditional human narration in blind testing.
Audiobooks on Spotify on an iPhone.

You might assume most listeners would pick a real human voice over a synthetic one, but a new study says otherwise. Edison Research at SSRS surveyed 1,005 fiction audiobook fans in May 2026 for a study commissioned by AI audio company Spoken. The twist is that listeners rated the AI narration higher, and they did not even know it was AI until after they heard it (via Variety).

Why listeners favored the AI narration

Read more
Gemini can make sense of the world around you, but don’t let it observe your children just yet
AI can spot what a child is doing, but figuring out what it means still takes a human expert
Kid using an iPad

Google's Gemini models are becoming remarkably good at understanding videos, images, and conversations. A new study shows AI can even identify subtle behaviors in parent-child interactions with impressive accuracy. But here's the catch: while Gemini can reliably observe what is happening, researchers say it should not be trusted to decide what those behaviors actually mean.

Worth noting is that the study used Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is not Google's most advanced AI. That means future models could improve the results even further. Even so, the researchers argue that human experts remain essential.

Read more