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I've just received notice that my storage on Google Drive is about to exceed my storage limit. I often deal with this sort of thing by finding and removing a handful of obsolete giant files, freeing up enough space that there is no longer an issue.

However, it could be more (or also) useful to remove a handful of obsolete directories full of thousands of smaller files... Where the folder size is significant even though the individual files are small.

Is it possible (and how would it be done) to either sort the directories of Google Drive by the sum size of their contents, or to search for directories containing greater than 50MB for example?

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This is a good question.

I do not think at the moment this is possible, mainly because directories or folders in GDrive are just labels, and not exactly storage space - files on the other hand occupy storage space, so they can be sorted by that dimension.

Hope this helps.

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  • The main reason folders do not display storage space is that it takes too much processing power to constantly re-calculate the amount of storage taken up within the directory. (That is the same reason why Windows does not display folder sizes in Windows Explorer.) A problem I can identify with the question is that there may be many directories within a single directory. The question then arises as to what level of directory the user is looking for, or what range of sizes.
    – ahorn
    Commented May 7, 2020 at 18:08
  • There are computationally reasonable ways to handle this, though it may simply be that Google has not chosen to do them. To clarify the intent, it would have to be fully recursive. The benefit would be reduced to almost zero if the directory size info only looked into n-number of subdirectories.
    – HumanJHawkins
    Commented May 8, 2020 at 18:14

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