# How to See Folder Sizes on a Mac (Finder and Terminal)

> Finder hides folder sizes in list view. Turn on Calculate all sizes, use Get Info, or run du in Terminal, and why the three give different numbers.

Canonical: https://bytesweep.app/answers/see-folder-sizes-on-mac.html
Last updated: 2026-11-04

## How do I see folder sizes on a Mac?

Finder hides folder sizes in list view. Turn on Calculate all sizes, use Get Info, or run du in Terminal, and why the three give different numbers.

- By [Shajeen Ahamed](https://bytesweep.app/about.html#author)
- Updated 4 November 2026
- Steps checked against Apple's documentation

**Short answer**

Finder leaves the Size column empty for folders. Open the folder in list view (Command-2), press Command-J and turn on **Calculate all sizes**; sizes fill in and you can sort by them. For one folder, select it and press Command-I. In Terminal, `du -sh *` lists the size of everything in the current folder.

### How do I show folder sizes in Finder list view?

1. Open the folder you want to look inside and choose View, as List, or press Command-2.
2. Choose View, Show View Options, or press Command-J.
3. Turn on **Calculate all sizes**. The Size column starts filling in, folder by folder.
4. Click the Size column heading to sort, largest first.

The setting belongs to the folder you set it in. The **Use as Defaults** button at the bottom of the View Options window applies it to folders that have no view settings of their own, but folders you have already arranged keep theirs, which is why the option seems to switch itself off in some places. On a folder with hundreds of thousands of files, such as your home folder, the sizes take a while to appear and the Finder can feel slow while it counts.

### How do I check the size of a single folder?

Select it and press Command-I (File, Get Info). The General section shows "Calculating size" for a moment, then a line such as "4,812,330,112 bytes (4.81 GB on disk) for 21,906 items". The figure in brackets is the space the files really take on the disk, which is the number that matters when you are short of room.

Press Command-Option-I instead and you get the Inspector: one window that follows whatever you select, so you can click through a dozen folders without opening a dozen Info windows.

### How do I list folder sizes in Terminal?

`du` (disk usage) adds up the blocks each folder occupies. These three cover most needs:

```
## every item in the current folder, human-readable
du -sh *

## one level down from your home folder, smallest to largest
du -hd 1 ~ 2>/dev/null | sort -h

## the 20 largest folders inside ~/Library
du -sh ~/Library/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -20
```

`2>/dev/null` hides the "Operation not permitted" lines. Those lines mean macOS kept Terminal out of a protected folder (Mail, Messages, Safari and some of ~/Library), so the totals come out low. To count everything, add Terminal under System Settings, Privacy & Security, Full Disk Access, then open a new Terminal window.

### Why do Finder, Get Info and du show different sizes?

Three reasons, and none of them means one tool is wrong.

| Cause | What you see | Which number to trust |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Units | Finder counts 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. `du -h` counts 1G as 1,073,741,824 bytes, so the same folder looks about 7% smaller in Terminal. | Either; they are the same size in different units. |
| Files in iCloud, Dropbox or OneDrive that are not downloaded | The Size column shows the full file size; Get Info's "on disk" figure and `du` show almost nothing, because only a placeholder is on the Mac. | "On disk" and `du`, for how much space you would get back. |
| APFS clones and shared blocks | A file duplicated in Finder on an APFS disk shares its blocks with the original until one of them changes. Each copy still reports its full size, so a folder of clones can add up to more than it really takes. | Free space on the disk, which is the only figure that sees the sharing. |

If the numbers still disagree by tens of gigabytes, the gap is usually space the folders do not explain at all: local Time Machine snapshots and purgeable space. [What purgeable space is](https://bytesweep.app/blog/purgeable-space-mac.html) and [what is in System Data](https://bytesweep.app/mac-system-data.html) cover those.

### How do I see the size of hidden folders such as ~/Library?

Press Command-Shift-Period in a Finder window to show hidden files and folders, and press it again to hide them. To open your Library folder, hold Option and choose Go, Library, or press Command-Shift-G and type `~/Library`. List view with Calculate all sizes then works there like anywhere else. Before deleting anything you find, read [what is safe to delete in the Library folder](https://bytesweep.app/answers/mac-library-folder-what-to-delete.html): most of it is app data, not junk.

### When is a folder-size tool quicker?

Finder answers "how big is this folder". It does not answer "where in the whole disk did 200 GB go", because you have to open each folder in turn and wait for it to count. A disk analyzer scans once and shows every folder, nested, sorted by size. On a Mac the free ones are GrandPerspective (a treemap) and OmniDiskSweeper (a sorted column browser); [how they compare](https://bytesweep.app/alternatives/omnidisksweeper-alternative.html) is on its own page.

Bytesweep does the same scan and shows it nine ways, including Map, List, By kind, Biggest files and Not used for a long time, each down to the single file, with a button to show it in Finder. It also names what each big folder is (an Xcode cache, Docker's disk image, an iPhone backup) and whether it is safe to remove. It is free to try for 3 days; cleaning needs a $29.99 licence, once per computer.

### Sources

Read on 4 November 2026. If something here has changed, write to [support@bytesweep.app](mailto:support@bytesweep.app) and it will be corrected.

- [Apple, Mac User Guide (macOS 27)](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac)
- [Apple, Free up storage space on your Mac](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/free-up-storage-space-sysp4ee93ca4/mac)

### Keep reading

- [**How do I find large files on a Mac?**](https://bytesweep.app/answers/find-large-files-on-mac.html)
- [**Disk space analyzer for Mac**](https://bytesweep.app/mac-disk-space-analyzer.html)
- [**How to free up space on a Mac**](https://bytesweep.app/free-up-space-on-mac.html)
- [**All answers**](https://bytesweep.app/answers/)

### See what is filling your disk, and why.

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