Delete Empty Folders – Show Folder Sizes in Windows

How to Find Empty Folder and Files in Windows?

In this article, we have listed methods to delete empty folders in Windows. While empty folders do not occupy much space, it is always good to have fewer files and folders. Certainly, it is a good practice to keep a well-organized file system. Even though empty folders are empty they still occupy space because of their names and structure. That space is negligible, but having fewer files and folders will make your system run faster overall. By following the instructions below, you can delete empty folders and files in just a few steps.

Remove Empty Folders Using Free Folder Size Application

Folder Size is the best free tool for disk space analysis and clean-up. In other words, finding and deleting empty folders is just one of its many features. Here are just a few of the reports that it can provide for you.

File and folder reports:

• Find Largest Files
• List Largest Folders
• Largest Files And Folders
• Locate Oldest Files
• Display Oldest Folders
• Search Oldest Files And Folders
• Identify Newest Files
• View Newest Folders
• Display Newest Files and Folders
• Longest Paths and Longest File Names
• Find Empty Folders (zero sizes)
• Locate Empty Folders (zero items)
• List Empty Files (zero sizes)

Most importantly, the tool will list all your folder sizes including all their subfolders and files. Surely, this is extremely useful as such information is not available in Windows Explorer. Therefore, you can easily determine the largest folders and focus on them in order to free up disk space quicker. 

As you can see in the screenshot above the tool displays the file and folder sizes in a beautiful chart too. This makes it very easy to spot the largest files and folders. You can switch between bar and pie charts.

Another nice feature is the option to print folders. The tool can print to the printer or a PDF, TIFF, or other files. Additionally, you can export all files and folders to EXCEL or XML files.

Steps to Delete Empty Folder in Windows

1. Right-click a folder in Windows Explorer and select “Scan with Folder Size”
2. Folder Size will list the content of the folder and all file and folder sizes. Further, from the reports menu on the toolbar select “Empty -> Folders (zero sizes)”. To clarify, the reports menu is the one with the down chevron and by default displays “Files and folders”. As you can see in the above screenshot, the title of the button is with bold text.
3. The tool will list all the empty folders in the details view on the right.
4. Select the empty folders that you want to remove or select all by pressing CTRL+A.
5. Delete the empty folder by selecting “Delete” from the context menu or press DEL on the keyboard. As a result, the tool will delete the folders to the recycle bin by default. If you want to delete them permanently hold the SHIFT key while pressing DEL or selecting the “Delete” action.

Folder Sizes In Windows 11

The Folder Size application is now Windows 11 compatible. The main improvements that we have applied in version 4.9.5.0 are related to supporting Windows 11. Additionally, we have applied a bug fix for the delete feature. In some rare cases like deleting empty folders, the delete feature could crash. This would happen only if there were multiple nested empty folders. This is a rare situation and probably you may have not experienced the issue. We have also updated the installer and it provides better compatibility with newer Windows versions.

You can find the complete What’s New List Here.

Download Folder Size and save valuable disk space and eliminate empty folders.

Delete Empty Folder From Command Line

You can use the Windows Command Prompt console to delete empty folders too. Even though you will not need to install any tools, I do not recommend you to try this method if you are not familiar with those commands. You should always delete files and folders with high caution. Certainly, losing important information is not something that you would like.

Steps to delete the empty folder from the Window Console (CMD):

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder or drive in which you want to remove the empty folders.
2. Press SHIFT on the keyboard and hold it down while you right-click the folder or drive that you want to clean. Select “Open command window here”. As a result, a black console window will open.
3. Copy and paste the following command in it and press ENTER:

   for /f "usebackq delims=" %%d in (`"dir /ad/b/s | sort /R"`) do rd "%%d"

The rd command will not delete any folders that contain data so you should be safe with the above command. What it does is to find all folders and their subfolder. Then it sorts them in reverse order and tries to delete them. As the rd command can not delete folders that contain subfolders or files, it will delete only the empty folders.

While the above example may get the job done it can not handle situations where the folders contain empty files. It will not delete folders that contain useless files either. Such files for example are the “thumbs.db” files. Windows creates those to store a preview of your image files. It does not handle UNICODE characters too. If you have folders with non-Latin letters in the name the command will not process them.

Using the free Folder Size application to delete empty folders is much simpler and free. Being able to visually inspect and review the folders is also much more convenient. The tool can also delete the folders to the Recycle Bin. Therefore, if you have deleted something by mistake, you can just use the “Restore” option to undelete the folder.

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