Tip #13: Displaying Folder Size Information in Windows Explorer

Today's tip is on displaying the size of the contents of a folder directly in Windows Explorer... This makes it easy to narrow down which folders/directories on your hard drive are using more space than you'd like...

Since Windows XP does not include this functionality in the operating system, we'll be using an open source Explorer extension called, appropriately enough, Folder Size... This extension allows you to add a column in Explorer's details view so that both file and folder sizes are shown... Folder Size calculates the folder sizes in the background as a service, so as to minimize any performance hit created by the application...

Folder Size can be downloaded from SourceForge here...

Once you've downloaded and installed the application, you'll need to configure Explorer to make use of it... Open Explorer/My Computer and change to details view by selecting View/Details from the menu bar...Your initial details view should look similar to this:


To add our new column, right-click on any of the column headers, deselect "Size" and select "Folder Size" as shown below:


After you've made the changes listed above, your details view will look similar to this:


Once you've become accustomed to using Folder Size, you'll wonder why this functionality was not included in XP, and it will become difficult to live without... To use this format as the default for all your folders, once you have it configured as you'd like it you can select Tools/Folder Options/View/Apply to All Folders from Explorer's menu bar...

If you have any questions, please leave a comment...

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