5 Ways To Get the Total Size Of a Folder On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can get the size of Folders on your Mac. 

When you are looking at Files and Folders in the Finder on your Mac it is easy to see the size of Files. But it is not so easy to see the total size of a Folder and everything inside it. For instance, here in the Finder I'm looking at my Home Folder. In List View here I can see in the Size Column the size of the two files shown here. But for the Folders it doesn't show anything under Size. In other views it is even worse. In Column View it doesn't show the size for anything. In Icon View you also don't see the size here either. 

So the simplest way to get the total size of any folder is just to use Quick Look. You're probably familiar using Quick Look for files. For instance I'll select this pdf file here. I'll simply press the spacebar to bring up Quick Look. It will show me a preview of the contents inside the file. So if it was an image I would see the image here. As a pdf I'd see the contents of the pdf. But what if I were to select a Folder, like this one, and then press the spacebar for Quick Look. I do that I just see the Icon, really large. I'll see the name of the folder and then underneath it I'll see information about the folder. The very first thing I see there is the Total Size of the folder. That is the size of every file inside that folder added up. So this is the easiest way to see the size of a folder. Select a Folder, press the spacebar, and then you see the size there. You can even keep the Quick Look window open and select a different folder, like this, and you can see how Quick Look changes to show that folder. Tells you the size and how many items are inside. This works in different views as well. So I can go here into Icon View, select a folder, press the spacebar, and get the total size. 

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Now another way to bring up that information is to use what's called the Preview Pane. Now you probably have seen the Preview Pane before if you use Column View. When you use Column View and you select a file you get a preview over here. It looks just like Quick Look and that includes the size under here which is something that Quick Look doesn't actually include. If you select a Folder in Column View you simply look at the contents of that folder, like this. It doesn't give you the file size. But if you use another view, like List View here, go to View and you Show Preview. So adding that Preview Pane to the right. Then it works just like in Column View. I can select a file and I can see the preview for that file and even the size of it. But if I select a Folder now, like this, then I see the size of all of the files in that folder. You can just leave this open and jump to different folders to see the size. This even works in Icon View as long as you have the Preview Pane On selecting a Folder will show you the total size. It is just kind of ironic that the place where you see the Preview Pane by default, the Column View, doesn't give you that. 

Now another way to see the size of a folder is to simply get info for that folder. So, for instance, I'm going to select this folder here again and if I go to File, Get Info or simply use Command I as the keyboard shortcut, then it brings up the Info Window here which gives me the total size. If I were to select another folder, like this one, and use Command I to bring up Info I have two separate Info windows each showing me the folder that I had selected when I used Command I. If I select multiple folders, like these three by holding Shift and selecting the range and I do Command I, I get the size for each folder in its own Info Window. 

But an alternative to the Info Window is the Inspector. If I select a folder here and I go to File, Get Info but I hold the Option Key down, like that, I can see the keyboard shortcut Option Command I is Show Inspector. If I use this menu command here or Option Command I, I get what looks like the Info Window but it has a smaller title here at the top and this is, in fact, Inspector. It will stay on top and there's only one of them. It just reflects whatever I have selected. So here I see the size for this folder. But if I were to select this folder here the Inspector changes to show me the size for whatever is selected. So it's kind of handy to just have around and then look at the size for the different folders. Also, if you were to select multiple folders, I'll hold down Shift and select this range here, you can see it says three folders and gives me the total size adding up the size for each of these three folders into one number. 

Now out of all of the Finder views the one that actually lets you see the size by default is List View. There's a column here for size. But it only shows you the size for files. It leaves blank the size for Folders. But you can change that. Go to View and then Show View Options, or simply Command J. Then if you look near the bottom you'll see Calculate All Sizes. Turn this On and it will calculate the size for each of these folders and list it here. This is useful because if you don't use it and you Sort By Size it simply is going to put all the folders together in alphabetical order. But if you do turn On Calculate All Sizes then it will take size into consideration and it will put them in the order based on size, in this case the largest first. 

Note that sometimes it takes a little while to calculate the sizes. If you have a folder with a ton of files in it, it has to add them all together so you may see a delay as each folder size fills in there in the list. The same thing is true for any other method. It is just until now we've been looking at comparatively small folders with just a few files in them. So for instance, at the top level here if I select my Applications Folder and I use Command I you'll see here it's going to say Calculating Size and it'll take a little while to figure out the total size of all the applications in the Applications Folder. There's a lot in there. 

Now one other thing I want to mention is what happens when you try to get the total size of a folder that's in iCloud Drive. Now, let's assume that in System Settings under your iCloud Settings you have turned On, under Drive, the Optimize Mac Storage Option. So this means that files that you don't regularly use, that maybe take up a lot of space, will be off-loaded to iCloud. You'll see them listed on your Mac's Drive. But, when you go to look at the file you'll see an icon like this showing that it needs to be downloaded. So, for instance, here in the Examples Folder I see that this file here is not available locally. If I double-click to open it, it will download and download relatively quickly and I'll barely notice that it wasn't downloaded. But for now it is saving me the 35MB of space by not having it stored or cached locally on my drive. So, what happens if I were to get info on this folder. If I use that method there you can see it says the size is approximately 108 MB but it says 72.8 MB on disk. So it is taking into account the fact that this file is not actually using up any space on my local drive. I have a total size here in bytes and then a size on disk here in MB. 

If I were to calculate all sizes here I can see that it gives me the total size right there. If I use the Preview Pane you can see I get the total size. So only the Info Window actually gives me the space that it takes up on the local drive letting me know there is a difference. 

One other thing I want to mention is the why wouldn't you just have Calculate All Sizes turned on for every folder all the time? After all it is useful information. Well, keep in mind it is actually performing a calculation on what could be lots and lots of files. So it is going to take up some System resources to always be calculating this as you change items in folders. So you probably just want to leave this Off, just for slightly better performance, so it is not always doing that calculation for all these folders. 

But it certainly does come in handy when you want to figure out what's taking up a lot of space on your drive and you want to do some Spring cleaning. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.