How To View Folder Size for Google Drive Folders

Google Drive is an awesome place to store your files, with extremely generous free plans and large storage capacity with the paid plans. It synchronizes files across devices and allow users to share and collaborate. Google Drive is perfect for users who always work on the go, as it can be accessed on multiple devices and softwares.

Some of the pros of using Google drive include:

• Auto Save – In Google drive all your work is automatically saved, so you won’t ever lose a piece of work again!
• Device Compatibility – You can share files in different devices easily.
• Offline Access – Despite being primarily an online work space, users can still access to their files even when offline.
• Sharing and Collaboration – Files can be shared with other users online.

Although there are other players in the cloud storage marketplace, including OneDrive (Microsoft), Dropbox, Box, and Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive is above the rest for the amount of storage provided. Google Drives gives 15 GB of file storage free, with 100 GB and 1 TB plans costing $2/month and $10/month, respectively. There are even larger storage plans available for people with genuinely immense storage needs.

However, you may need to free up space in your Google Drive account at some point. Maybe you have a lot of personal videos and photos to store, or you may not be willing to pay a monthly subscription and just want to stick into your 15 GB free storage. Regardless, when you need to get that storage organized and slimmed down, you’ll find that Google Drive is a bit feature-light in the area of file management. Specifically, it’s not possible within the Google Drive web interface to find out how big each folder is. You can look at file sizes, but the total size of the files in each folder is a mystery.

Nonetheless, it is possible to get that information. In this article, we will show you different methods to find out how big each folder in your Google Drive is.

It’s surprising that Google hasn’t added folder size details to its cloud storage. Any file manager software would include that information. Presumably there is some performance hit associated with compiling the information and presenting it to users. In any event, I am going to show you two ways to find out the size of your folder.

Quick Fix: Are You Just Looking For Big Files?

If you’re just looking for the biggest files so you can clear them out, there’s a quick workaround that will let you skip the rest of this article.

1. Go to Google Drive.
2. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner.
   
3. Click Settings.
   
4. Click “View items taking up storage.”

Google Drive will then display a list of every file in your Google Drive, automatically sorted by file size. You can then decide whether you want to keep those big files, save them somewhere else, or delete them.

Method 1: Download the Folder

The brute-force approach is simple: download the Google Drive folder to your local hard drive. There, you can view storage size details for the downloaded folder in File Explorer, then delete the whole folder when it is no longer needed.

To download a Google Drive folder, follow these steps:

1.  Click My Drive on the left of the Google Drive page to expand a list of folders.
2. Right-click a folder and press “Download” to save a copy to your hard drive.

When you select that option, a “Preparing download” bar will open at the bottom right corner in Google Drive. This tells you that it is zipping the file. It will let you know when it is ready to download, and the folder’s ZIP file will save to your browser’s default download folder.

Open the downloaded Google Drive folder in File Explorer. Since it saves as a compressed ZIP file, you should extract it first by opening the ZIP and pressing “Extract all.” Select a destination path for the extracted folder, and press the “Extract” button.

Right-click the extracted folder in File Explorer and select “Properties” to open the Properties window. The General tab includes folder size details. If you’re finished, you can right-click the folder and select “Delete.”

Method 2: Add the Backup and Sync app

Backup and Sync is an app that syncs Google Drive cloud storage with your hard disk. It displays all of your Google Drive files and folders within a Google Drive File Explorer folder. Since it shows the cloud storage folders in File Explorer, you can view Google Drive folder sizes in Windows’ native file manager by installing Backup and Sync on your computer.

To add Backup and Sync to Windows, click the “Download” button here. That will save the software’s installer to your hard drive. Open the software’s installer to add Backup and Sync to Windows. The installer will walk you through three steps to get you set up.

1. Sign in to your Google Account. Make sure this is the Google Account that is associated with your Google Drive account.
2. The next window will ask you which folders from your PC you want to back up to Google Drive. You can select a few folders to back up by clicking “Choose Folder,” but you do not have to. To skip this step, de-select all folders and press “Next.”
3. The third step is the one we are looking for. The “Sync My Drive to this computer” option is selected by default. The default place for your Google Drive folder to be backed up to locally is your user directory; you can choose an alternative one by clicking “Path.”
4. Select “Sync only these folders…” to display a list of all the folder in your Google Drive. The folder size will be displayed next to each folder. While this is not an easy way to check folder size every time, it is a great one-off solution that does not require you to install anything on your computer. If you have the information you need, quit the wizard. Otherwise, press “Start” to begin syncing Google Drive with your hard drive.

File Explorer will now include a Google Drive folder, which you can open by clicking Quick access > Google Drive. File Explorer’s Size column does not include any folder storage size details in the main display, but you can check a folder’s size by hovering the cursor over a folder to open its tooltip.

We’ve got more tips on how to get the most out of Google Drive!

Want more room on your Google Drive? Check out this tutorial on how to free up Google Drive space.

Want to save your photos online? Learn how to automatically back up your photos to Google Drive!

Do a lot of torrenting? We’ll show you how to download your torrent files to Google Drive.

File management isn’t Drive’s strong suite, but we can show you how to duplicate or copy a folder.

Need some privacy? We’ve got a tutorial on hiding files in Google Drive.