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Windows 10: Show Size of Folders

Windows 10: Show Size of Folders

March 31, 2020 by Mel Hawthorne 14 Comments

The Windows 10 file explorer has a lot of useful functions, but many of them aren’t too obvious. If you want to see the size of your folders, you have several options available to you. Here are some of the best:

  1. Hover

If you want to see the size of your folders, you can actually do so just by hovering over a folder. Open your File Explorer to a random location and hover for a second or two over the folder in question.

You’ll see some additional info there, and part of that is the size of the folder!

Information displayed on hover
  1. Make Size visible

If you want to see your file sizes permanently, you can easily change a setting to make this possible. Open a file explorer window and right-click on the ‘Name’ field at the top. You’ll see some options – specifically, options, that let you pick what sort of info you want to see about your folders.

Options

Select Size and the property will appear on the far right of your window.

Tip: While the size property will appear, it may sometimes be empty – Windows can’t always correctly estimate file sizes in that view, especially for folders that contain additional folders. Use one of the other methods if this one doesn’t work for you!

  1. User Properties

For the most detailed view of your folder sizes, you’ll have to use the Properties feature. To do so, right-click on a folder and select Properties at the bottom of the menu.

Properties

A new window will open up and show you some additional info on your folder.

File size info

You’ll see what size a folder is, if it is compressed, how much space it takes up on the disk (this is the size on disk property), and even how many other files and folders are in the folder.

Tip: Windows only looks into the actual folder, not sub-folders. So, if your folder contains two files and two folders, each with two files each, this view will still say two files and two folders. It doesn’t count the files in those folders into the total number of files, but it DOES count them into the folder size property of X MB, for example.

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Filed Under: Windows

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Time Wasted says

    February 6, 2022 at 2:07 am

    BLOCKING this garbage site. Misinformation on the internet is a serious problem and should be dealt with, abruptly and harshly.

  2. Binjaminan Man says

    July 13, 2021 at 3:29 pm

    I prefer to use a program: Directory Report
    Much faster than WinDirStat
    and can find duplicate files too

  3. Jason Vesagie says

    July 9, 2021 at 12:13 am

    No that didnt help at all

  4. Truth says

    June 5, 2021 at 12:15 am

    As someone said above WinDirStat is a very simple utility that will scan your drive(s) and give you a very detailed graphical look as well as a traditional list view for every folder and file on your system. You can sort by size, name, number of files, number of subfolders, date modified, When you click on a folder in the list, it is highlighted on the graphic, and vise versa. There’s also a smaller window that sorts size used by file type and switches on/off desired extensions in the graphic view. So, you can click on mp3 and all mp3’s are highlighted regardless of where they are on the drive. You can literally mouse over every single individual file on your computer and see it’s file path, but also click on it be taken to it’s containing folder in the list view.. It’s really the most useful tool I’ve found to see what’s hogging all your hd space.

    It would still be very useful to see the size of folders in windows explorer, but WinDirStat at least gives you a tool to mitigate the absence of the feature. The other utility I’ve heard is helpful is TreeSize Free, although I’ve never used it and can’t vouch for it.

  5. Paul says

    May 6, 2021 at 10:42 am

    WinDirStat will show you a graphic view (as well as list) of sizes of all folders. Great for finding what’s eating up all your space.

  6. Sue Toledo says

    February 26, 2021 at 7:10 pm

    What a nightmare! Of course, we need the size of a folder (sum of the size of all files and subfolders within the folder) displayed next to the folder name when using the file explorer. Now that they’re cutting back on the size of the computer for a given price, conserving space has become an issue even for serious home and small business users. Since the data is immediately available with properties, if the user has time to check each folder one by one (and who does???), I assume it was just an oversight. I desperately hope it will be in an update soon.

  7. Sean Riddolls says

    January 30, 2021 at 11:51 am

    This feature existed in Windows XP, however, it was not accessible by default. You needed to go into the registry to enable it. But when activated, it succinctly the displayed folder size of every folder in the ‘Details’ or ‘List’ folder view, providing an excellent overview of which folders were bloated with [often] archived and/or hidden files.

    The reason this feature was hidden, became obvious after enabling it – the drive would grind away calculating folder sizes every time you opened a new directory window. If you hit a network drive, then your system would virtually lock up, as it attempted to calculate the network folder sizes across the remote network.

    I’m certain by this point, Microsoft could script an intelligent folder size algorithm, which cached the local folder size records in a system file, and only calculated folder sizes for newly accessed folders. And ignores network folder sizes calculations, until specifically requested.

  8. John Gordon says

    December 7, 2020 at 3:18 pm

    ditto for all previous messages. I have the same problem. How can i see volume of the files like i used to be able to?

  9. Joseph says

    November 27, 2020 at 9:32 pm

    There is this cool website called Google. Use google.com and type in what you are looking for. Usually within 30 minutes you’ll have your answer and solution. All the cool kids are using it!

  10. Ben says

    November 6, 2020 at 10:23 am

    Use Treesize Free to analyse.

  11. Christopher Burkholder says

    September 13, 2020 at 2:53 am

    No, it did not. I am trying to find where all of my disk space has been used up, and using the information provided here, option 2 is useless, as it does not show the size of folders, only files. Option 1 and 3 and time consuming and generally a pain, as you have to check each folder individually.

    I am looking for a method that will show me my folder tree, and how much data is stored, files and sub-folders, in each folder of the tree. This really shouldn’t be so hard to do.

  12. Brian says

    August 15, 2020 at 4:02 pm

    As said earlier “this does not show how big the folder is”. It took ages to find and it’s a microsoft folder that,s hogging all the space ( Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe ). No doubt I’ll have to waste loads more time trying to sort this. Bring back XP….

  13. James S Olendorf says

    August 15, 2020 at 6:56 am

    30 years and Windows still doesn’t show the folder size. Unbelievable.

  14. Joel Hedland says

    July 20, 2020 at 10:29 am

    This does not tell me how to see the total number of bytes used inside the folder. That was easy in Win5 and 7 but with your improved win 10 there is no such easy way to get to this valuable information that I have found.

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