See Folder Sizes in a Finder Window

In this video, I will show you how you can see how much space individual folders are taking on your Mac. When you use this little trick, I’m going to show you what you’re able to do is then sort a Finder window by folder size, so then you can see where all of your large files or all of your folders that are taken up a lot of space are. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s go and open up a new Finder window. I go down to my Finder here, and now I’m in Dan’s Tutorials. This is a folder. Now, if we look at this folder here, you’re going to see I have several individual folders in it. Over to the right, when we go over to size, you’ll also notice that it does not list these folders’ size. So I do not know how much space each one of these folders is taking. If I go to my Documents folder here, you’re going to see I do have a document here, and I can see how much space set document is taking.

But what I would like to do is see how much space a folder has taken. How do we do that? All we need to do, I’m going to close this; well, all we need to do is go up under View in the menu bar and then go down to Show View Options. We have a new window that opens up. We have several different options in this window. But the one that we’re going to look at is Calculate All Sizes. When I turn this on, it will calculate all of the sizes for the folders and the files in this window, Dan’s Tutorials. This will only apply to the window that I have open. So it’s only going to apply to me Dan’s Tutorials.

So now, let’s go ahead and turn this on. We’re going to close this window, and if we look over to the right of my folders, I can see how much space each folder is taking. So now I can see that downloads here are taken up 26 gigabytes. I can see that Parallels here is taking up 27 gigabytes.

Another nice little trick is to sort this by size. When I click on size here, it’s going to sort this, and now I can see which folders are taken up the most space. They’re going to be listed at the top because that’s how it’s sorted. I can now see that my Parallels, Downloads, and Pictures are taken up the most space.

So that’s how we can quickly see how much space our folders are taking. All we have to do is open up the folder. We want to View, go up under View in the menu bar, Show View Options, and then select Calculate All Sizes. From there, your Mac is going to calculate all of the sizes for that individual folder. We’re then able to see how much those nested folders of folders within that folder are taking. From there, you can sort it by size and then see which folders are taken up the most space and maybe delete a few files to free up some space.

So that’s how we can quickly see how much space individual folders are taking on the Mac.