How To View Folder Size for Google Drive Folders

Robert Hayes March 29, 2023

Google Drive is a fantastic place to store your files, with highly generous free plans and large storage capacity with the paid plans. It synchronizes files across devices and allows users to share and collaborate files. Google Drive is perfect for those who constantly work on the go, as the application is accessible on multiple devices and software.

How To View Folder Size for Google Drive Folders

Some of the pros of using Google drive include the following:

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 on different devices easily.
Offline Access: Despite being primarily an online workspace, users can still access their files even offline.
Sharing and Collaboration: Users can share files with other users online.

Although other players in the cloud storage marketplace exist, including OneDrive (Microsoft), Dropbox, and Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive is above the rest for the storage provided. Google Drives gives free 15 GB of personal/business file storage, with 2 TB business plans costing $12/month. Even additional storage plans are available when using Google One for people with immense storage needs.

Regardless of storage space limits, you may need to occasionally free some space up in your Google Drive account. Maybe you have a lot of personal videos and photos to store, or you may not be willing to pay a monthly subscription and want to stick to your 15 GB of 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 file management. Specifically, it’s impossible within the Google Drive web interface to determine each folder’s size. You can look at individual file sizes, but the folder’s total size is a complete mystery.

Nonetheless, getting a folder’s size information in Drive is possible. Let’s get started.

Quick Fix: How to View Big Files in Drive

If you’re looking for significantly sized files to clear out, a quick workaround will let you skip the rest of this article.

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

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

Download the Drive Folder to View Its Size

The brute-force approach is simple: download the Google Drive folder to your local hard drive. From the downloaded folder, 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:

Click “My Drive” on the left of the Google Drive page to expand a list of folders.
Right-click a folder and select “Download” to save a copy to your hard drive.
A “Preparing download” bar opens, showing it 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.
Unzip the downloaded Google Drive folder in “File Explorer.” Select a “destination path” for the extracted folder, and press the “Extract” button.
Right-click the extracted folder in File Explorer and select “Properties.” The “General tab” includes folder size details. You can right-click the folder if you’re finished and select “Delete.”

Add the Backup and Sync app to view Drive Folder Size

Backup and Sync is an app that syncs Google Drive cloud storage with your hard disk. It displays all your Google Drive files and folders in File Explorer. You can view each Google Drive folder and file size there.

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.

Go to “Google Drive” in a browser and sign in to the corresponding “Google Account” if needed.
In the selection window that appears, choose the folders you want to sync by clicking “Choose Folder.” To skip this step and sync every folder and file, press “Next.”
The “Sync My Drive to this computer” option gets selected by default, but you can specify the preferred location by clicking “Path.”
If you chose “Path” in the above options, select “Sync only these folders…” to display a list of all the folders in your Google Drive.
The folder size gets displayed next to each one. View the sizes and quit the wizard. Otherwise, press “Start” to begin syncing Google Drive to get all folder and file sizes on your PC.
File Explorer now includes a Google Drive folder, which you can open by clicking “Quick access > Google Drive” and then review a folder’s size by hovering the cursor over it.