How to Show Folder Sizes in List View on a Mac

October 19, 2026 · 5 min read

In list view, the Finder's Size column shows two dashes, “--”, for every folder. You can see that a video weighs 2 GB, but not which folder holds 80 GB.

The quick fix in the Finder: open the folder in list view, choose View › Show View Options (⌘J) and tick Calculate all sizes. Click Use as Defaults to get the same in other folders. In Folia Files, there is nothing to switch on: the Detailed List and Tree views calculate folder sizes on local disks by default, in the background, so you can sort a folder by size as soon as you open it.

The home folder in Folia Files in Detailed List, sorted by size: Pictures, Movies and Downloads first, each folder with its size

Why folders show “--” in the Finder

The size of a file is recorded by the file system, so the Finder can show it at once. A folder has no size of its own: it is the total of every file inside it, down to the deepest subfolder. The only way to know it is to go through all of them, which takes time in a folder that holds tens of thousands of files, and even more on a network share, where every file is listed over the network. So the Finder leaves it out unless you ask for it.

Show folder sizes in the Finder

Turn on Calculate all sizes

Open the folder in a Finder window and switch to list view: View › as List (⌘2).
Choose View › Show View Options (⌘J).
Tick Calculate all sizes.
Click the Size column header to sort by size. Click it again to reverse the order.

The sizes then appear one after another. A big folder can take a while, and a list sorted by size reorders itself as they come in.

Use it in other folders

The Finder keeps view options folder by folder, and the View Options window changes the folder you are in. To use the same options elsewhere, click Use as Defaults at the bottom of the window. A folder whose view options you had already changed may keep its own, so you may have to tick the box there as well.

What it won't do

The option only exists in list view: icon, column and gallery views don't show folder sizes.
On a large folder or a network share, the calculation is slow and keeps the disk or the server busy while it runs.
For a single folder, File › Get Info (⌘I) shows its size without changing the view.

Folder sizes in Folia Files

In Folia Files, folder sizes are on by default. There is no option to look for in each folder.

Detailed List and Tree

Panes open in Detailed List by default (View › Detailed List, ⌘3), and its Size column shows the size of each folder, as it does for files. Tree (⌘4) has the same columns. A folder shows “--” while it is being measured, then its size.

Folia Files measures the folders inside the folder a pane shows. In Tree view, a folder you unfold lists its files with their sizes, but its own subfolders keep “--” until you open them in the pane. The other views (Icons, List, Columns and Gallery) don't show folder sizes.

How the sizes are measured

In the background. Two folders at a time, starting with those in the folder you are looking at. The pane never waits for them, and when you move to another folder, the measurements still waiting for the previous one are dropped.
Everything counts. Hidden files and the contents of packages are included, as the space they take on the disk. Apps in the Applications folder get their real size too.
They stay up to date. When something changes inside a folder, Folia Files keeps showing the last figure and measures the folder again shortly after: about 15 seconds later for an ordinary folder, less often for a very large one, so a folder that is written to all the time doesn't keep your Mac busy.

Sort and group by size

Click the Size column header, or choose View › Sort By › Size: the biggest items come first. Choose it again to reverse the order. A folder that is still being measured goes to the end of the folders and moves up as soon as its size arrives.
With Keep folders on top (Settings › Panes, on by default), folders are ranked among themselves, above the files. Turn it off to rank folders and files together.
View › Group By › Size puts items into groups by size: 100 MB to 1 GB, 10 to 100 MB, 1 to 10 MB and so on, from More than 1 GB down to Empty.

The same home folder grouped by size in Folia Files: Pictures, Movies and Downloads under 100 MB to 1 GB, Music under 10 to 100 MB

Where sizes aren't calculated

Servers and network shares (SMB, NFS, WebDAV, FTP…), and cloud drives mounted as a separate disk, such as pCloud Drive: their folders keep “--”. Measuring them would mean listing every file on the server.
Your Library folder, the system folders at the root of the disk, and the disks themselves are not measured automatically: they are huge or change all the time. Select one and choose File › Info (⌘I): the Info module measures it on demand and shows its size and number of items. Select several items, and it adds them up.
iCloud Drive and other cloud folders are measured, but only what is stored on this Mac counts: a file kept only online takes almost no space on the disk.
To turn sizes off, untick Calculate folder sizes (local disks) in Settings › Panes.

Folder sizes are in both editions of Folia Files, the one from the website and the one from the Mac App Store.

See what's inside the big folders

A list sorted by size tells you which folder is the biggest, one level at a time. To see how the space splits further down, switch the pane to View › Disk Usage (⌘7). Space Lens draws the folder as bubbles: the bigger the bubble, the more space it takes, and a click on a bubble takes you inside. It is one of Folia Files' Mac care tools, and if you know DaisyDisk, this comparison shows how the two differ.

The home folder in Folia Files' Disk Usage view: Pictures and Movies as the biggest bubbles

For a complete method to track down what fills your disk, Terminal commands included, see how to find the folders that take the most space on your Mac.