Change Download Location Chrome Mac

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Chromebooks are great portable computers, but most lack adequate storage space. If your Chromebook downloads a few large files, you've filled up that 16 GB of space. The SD card slot or USB ports give you supplemental storage, but your Chromebook defaults downloads to internal storage. Here's how to change the default download folder.

Open Advanced Settings on Your Chromebook

Change Download Location Chrome Macbook Pro

The easiest way to access these settings is typing in the Chrome browser chrome://settings. That takes you directly to settings. If you prefer the mouse, click on the hamburger menu in the upper right hand corner of your browser and pick Settings. Scroll down and click Show advanced settings…

Insert Your External Media

You'll need to do this before you change the download settings. Your Chromebook can write to FAT, exFat and NTFS drives (check here for the full list). Drives formatted for the Mac HFS+ format are read-only on the Chromebook. If you need to reformat the external drive, open up the Files App, right-click on the USB drive, and pick Format device. ChromeOS defaults to FAT32 for formatting. If you aren't sure of the format, copy a test file from your Downloads folder into the external drive.

Set the Download Location

Once your Chromebook mounts the USB drive or SD card, scroll down to the Downloads area in Settings and click Change…

That brings you to a File explorer window and lets you pick the download location. Pick your external media from the side menu and then click Open. ChromeOS doesn't give you a select option, so this is a bit confusing.

The Chromebook won't verify if the device is writable from ChromeOS – that's why you might need to test the external storage beforehand if you aren't sure of the format. As for the Ask where to save each file before downloading option, I think it's more efficient to uncheck that setting if you're downloading a bunch of files.

You can check the box next to the Ask setting if you want to download some files to external media and other files to internal storage. When you're done, your settings should say > media > removable > and then the name of your drive.

Heed a Few Warnings

If you remove the external media, the ChromeOS won't default back to the internal Downloads folder. I hope they fix that in a future release, as other operating systems revert to the standard download folder. Since the location is specified by name, if you rename your external media, the ChromeOS won't recognize the new disk as the download location. Don't bother trying to make your Dropbox the new Downloads location either. That setting didn't work.

Another problem I found out the hard way is that the Downloads folder is the default location for Chromebook screenshots. If you try to take a screenshot and the external drive isn't available, the screenshot fails with the message An error occurred. Failed to save screenshot. The Chromebook doesn't tell you why, so the error took me way too long to figure out.

Change Download Location Chrome Mac Installer

Remember if you're in guest mode, your downloads get erased from the internal drive when you log out. Change the Downloads folder as soon as you log in so you won't forget about your files.

Sure, you can just copy files from the Downloads folder to external storage, but this saves you a few steps if you're downloading large files or torrenting.

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Change Download Location Chrome Mac Browser

Web browsers save their caches at predetermined locations by default, which can usually be changed quite easily from within the browsers's Options. However, in Google Chrome, there is no visible option to change the location of the cache. This doesn't, however, mean that it can't be done.

In this guide we'll show you how to easily change the default save location of Google Chrome's cache.

Using Microsoft Windows 7, the default save location of Google Chrome's cache is:

C:UsersusernameAppDataLocalGoogleChromeUser DataDefaultCache

Change Download Location Chrome Mac Os

Here's how to change it by adding just a few parameters to the Google Chrome shortcut.

1. Locate a Chrome shortcut (Desktop, Start Menu, Taskbar etc.), right-click it and select Properties.
2. In the Target field append the following to the already present string:

   --disk-cache-dir='d:cache' --disk-cache-size=104857600

   Replace the text in red to any directory you would make the new cache directory. Click OK to exit.

Change Download Location Chrome

Next, Chrome needs to be configured to use the newly defined cache folder for opening previously visited links in the history. For this,
1. Type regedit in the Run command and click OK.
2. Navigate to the following registry key:

   HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTChromeHTMLshellopencommand

3. In the right hand pane, the location of the EXE of Chrome would be given. Right-click the entry and click on Modify.
4. Append the following to the already written value of the registry key after the chrome.exe' part

   --disk-cache-dir='d:cache' --disk-cache-size=104857600

   Note that the red directory location in this step should be identical to the one you specified in step #2 in the first section, otherwise Chrome will not be able to load pages from the newly set cache.

   The registry key value should now look something like this:

   'C:UsersMartinAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe' --disk-cache-dir='d:cache' --disk-cache-size=104857600 -- '%1'

   Click OK and exit the Registry Editor.

Chrome will now be configured to save cache at a new location and also retrieve previously loaded web pages from the new cache location as well. Restart Chrome and for the changes to take effect.