Folder Size for Windows : View Size of Folders

How many times I have opened the Windows Explorer or My Documents and wondered – why Windows does not show the size of folders?. It Windows Explorer can show size of files, sortable by size, why not folders. And my wish came true when I found this wonderful sourceforge project called Folder Size for Windows.

Folder Size for Windows adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer. The new column shows not only the size of files, but also the size of folders. It keeps track of which folders you view, and scans them in the background so you can see complete size of all files within the folder. It’s very useful for cleaning up your disk. Once you get used to having that information available, a directory listing simply looks incomplete without it!

Folder Size for Windows runs on Windows 2000 and higher, and has been tested almost exclusively on Windows XP.

After you download and install the installer, you will not see the folder sizes. This is what you need to do –

• Right click on the column headers to see a list of columns you can add. Choose Folder Size.
• Now we can replace the existing Size column with the new Folder Size column. Right click on the column headers and uncheck the Size column. Drag the Folder Size column header to where Size used to be.
• Make this the default view for all folders. Go to Folder Options from the Tools menu. In the View tab, click Apply to All Folders.

Folder Size for Windows may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License which means it’s free for anyone to use, and the code is free to be read and used, but if you modify the code at all, you must submit your improvements back to the project so everyone can use them.

This is an amazing add on and works very well for me, though there are some known issues. I wonder why Microsoft never added it into Windows by default. Maybe someone should tell them to integrate it into Windows Vista.