u/FactStrong3204

Telegram was taking up more than 20GB of storage on my MacBook.

I had already cleared the cache inside the Telegram app, and the app showed that the cache was less than 500MB. But somehow, more than 20GB was still sitting on my drive.

I eventually found it under:

Storage Settings > File Browser > Telegram > media folder

That media folder contained a huge amount of data.

What surprised me is that macOS storage management did not clearly catch this, and Telegram’s own cache management did not catch it either. So even though Telegram said the cache was almost empty, the media folder was still taking up over 20GB.

Just leaving this here in case anyone else is wondering why Telegram is still eating up storage on macOS after clearing the cache.