How To Get the Size Of a Folder On a Mac

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

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So when viewing files and folders in the Finder on your Mac you can easily get the file size of a single file. But getting the total size of all the files in a folder is sometimes a little more difficult.  So, for instance, here I am in List View. One of the columns I have is for Size. If you don't see a column in List View for Size you can Control Click on any column header here and add it. But you notice that the files sizes are represented but not the Folder sizes. They are all blank. However, if you select a folder and then use File and then Get Info, or Command i, then the Info window there will give you the total size and the details here. 

Now depending upon how many files are in the folder this may take awhile. So you may get a message saying It's Calculating until you finally get a result. This could take a few seconds or even a few minutes for folders filled with lots of files. You could do the same thing in other views as well. So in Icon View here I can select a file, do Command i, and then get the file size. I can select a folder and do Command i and get the total size. 

You could also show the Preview on the right side using View, Show Preview. With a folder selected it will give you the total size here. Just like with the Info window it may say Calculating if it's too much for it to get an instant result. You could do the same thing in List View here. You can see the total size is listed and you could select a folder and it will show it there. But how do you get the Size column to show all of the sizes? After all you probably want to be able to see all the sizes of these folders to figure out which one is using up a lot of space. Well, you could do that by going to View and then Show View Options, or Command J. There's an option here for Calculate All Sizes. Turn that On and it shows all the folders sizes. 

Now it happened pretty instantly here because there aren't too many files in these folders. But if you had folders filled with files it could take awhile which is exactly why it's not on my Default because it may slow down your Mac to always be calculating all the folder sizes. Now the Setting is remembered per folder. So if you go to another folder this will be turned Off. But go back to this one it will be turned On until you turn it Off again. While you're in List View you can open up a folder and the subfolders will also display the folder size as well. So List View is best for getting folder sizes for many different reasons. 

Note that when you're done looking at folder sizes you should probably turn this option Off so it's not always trying to calculate these folder sizes every time you bring up this location in the Finder.

Now Column View makes things a lot more difficult. When I have the Preview Sidebar open here it will give me the size for files. For folders it's just going to dig down inside the folders and I won't ever get the info for a folder here. But you can select a folder and do Command i to get info that way. Another thing you can do is use the Inspector. So the Inspector is hidden in the same menu item as Get Info. You just have to hold down the Option key and you can see the shortcut, Option Command i, brings up the Inspector. This looks like the info window but it will stay here, floating on top of everything else, and change for everything that you select. So I can click on different folders here and it will give me the folder size. Again it may show Calculating if the folder is too big. You can use this in any view. So I can go to the Icon View here, select a file, and it shows the size. Select a folder and it shows the size. The same thing in List View. You want to do this with just the mouse or trackpad you can right click on a mouse or two finger click on a trackpad on any folder. Select Get Info and that will come up. You can even do the same thing and then hold the Option key down. You can see Get Info changes to Show Inspector.   

So here are some more tips. Say you're in List View and you have Calculate All Sizes turned On. But you really just want to see the folders. You want to see which folders are the largest. Well, you can put all the folders at the top using a Finder Preference. In Finder Preferences you could set it to Keep Folders on Top in Windows When Sorting By Name. Since I am sorting by name here this will work and all the folders are now at the top. Of course if I sort by something else, like Size, the folders won't necessarily be on top. It's only by sorting by Name. So instead of using that preference you can also do View, Use Groups, and then you could see one of the groups here is Folders. So now all the Folders are grouped together and I can sort by size here. You can see the folders all stick together and I can see which folder's use the most space.

Here's another tip. Let's say you want to get the size for not just the folder but for several files. If I select these 4 files here and do Command i I'm going to get a different Info window for each one of those. But if I bring up the Inspector, with Option Command i, I get one Inspector window that says four items and tells me the total. So it's a way to get the size of several items. You can even do it for several folders. So these two folders total up to this much. 

Unfortunately this doesn't work very well when you're searching. So searches are always in List View. So let's do Command F and then let's go right here to Kind Is, folder. We're looking in the Document folder so these are all the folders and subfolders in the Documents folder. You see there's no size here, at least in most cases. So you can't do anything to bring up the size. Command J shows Calculate All Sizes is grayed out. You can go and Show Preview and then select a folder and then see the size there.  Also Command i for Get Info will do it or Option Command i will bring up the Inspector that will show you. So you can go through each one of these with the Inspector or the Preview Sidebar and see the file size but you won't be able to bring them up in the results here. So you can't Sort By Size, unfortunately. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.