Next, delete the DMG file itself unless you have a reason for keeping it around. Clicking either one of these opens the DMG file. The DMG mounts in two places: on your desktop and in the Finder sidebar under your hard drive. All you really need to do is double-click the DMG file to open it and mount it to your Mac. Well, luckily macOS does an excellent job of making everything easy. RELATED: Benchmarked: What's the Best File Compression Format? So How Do I Use DMG Files?

Saving your data usage on downloads is always a good thing. And that’s second reason why macOS uses DMG files: they’re a compressed format (like a ZIP file) that makes your download smaller. This little window first goes through a phase of verifying the file, and then once it’s sure the file is good, moves on to decompressing it. This is what you see when the file is opening: DMG files include something called a checksum, which basically verifies that the file is 100% intact. The main reason macOS uses DMG files is to make sure the file downloaded properly and wasn’t tampered with.