Can't see folder size in Explorer

Hi,
Can someone please help?
I can't see the size of each folder in Windows explorer.
If I open the folder, I can see the size of the individual files, but not the size of the folder.

It doesn't show it, no. You can right click and select properties or hover your mouse over it. Both show the size - properties shows more information such as the size on disk rather than just the nominal size that the tool tip shows.

There are plenty of third party tools which will show you the size of folders (such as treesize free ) but File explorer will not.

It doesn't show it, no. You can right click and select properties or hover your mouse over it. Both show the size - properties shows more information such as the size on disk rather than just the nominal size that the tool tip shows.

There are plenty of third party tools which will show you the size of folders (such as treesize free ) but File explorer will not.

Thanks! I downloaded treesize free, and that did the trick!

You're welcome. I guess the reason File Explorer doesn't show sizes is it could get sluggish if it had to add up the sizes of all items in folders before displaying them...

Windows Explorer does not show folder sizes because Windows doesn't know, and cannot know, without a potentially long and laborious process. A single folder might contain hundreds of thousands or even millions of files, each one of which would have to be looked at to obtain the folder size. That is bad enough on a fast SSD. But imagine what it would be like on a slow conventional drive, or even worse, a slow network connection.

See these articles for more information:




The blog entries are by Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer since before Windows 95.

Windows Explorer does not show folder sizes because Windows doesn't know, and cannot know, without a potentially long and laborious process. A single folder might contain hundreds of thousands or even millions of files, each one of which would have to be looked at to obtain the folder size. That is bad enough on a fast SSD. But imagine what it would be like on a slow conventional drive, or even worse, a slow network connection.

The blog entries are by Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer since before Windows 95.

With all due respect to the Microsoft windows development team it seems like it would be pretty easy to me to have windows have a table of folder sizes that it updates whenever a file is changed.

This is one of those things that seem simple at first. But when you consider the details of implimentation things become much more complex.

Be that as it may. I don't understand why tiny third party software can do it lighting fast but explorer is incapable of implementing similar technology.

Be that as it may. I don't understand why tiny third party software can do it lighting fast but explorer is incapable of implementing similar technology.

Because those tiny programs concentrate on doing that one thing only using fast recursive searches , explorer is coded to do a lot more and a file copy for example would get majorly bogged down if it ran that recursive search to the exemption of everything else when you opened a drive letter.

XYplorer manages this quite effectively - a dual pane tabbed full-featured file manager, so I would guess there are other 3rd party file managers that can do this too.