Nora Brown Design

(File) Size Matters

If you’ve ever tried to upload or email a file, and the process seems to slow to a crawl or stop altogether, it may be that the file is just too large. It is straightforward to check a file’s size in Mac or Windows.

Check file size in Mac OS X

It is easy to see file size in Mac’s Finder, depending on what view you use.

In the plain list view, shown above, file size is one of the columns.

If you need more information on a file, or if you want to get the size of a directory (folder) or even an entire volume (like your hard drive) you can hit Cmd(aka open apple)-i, and a window will popup up with a ton of info, including size, created and modified dates, and permissions.

Check file size in Windows

Windows works comparably to Mac — you can view files size in Windows Explorer (Windows’ file browser, not to be confused with Internet Explorer) and you can get extra info with a properties popup.

For more on Windows, check Vista Forums or this article on pre-Vista Windows.

And then buy a Mac instead because they’re GUI is so much prettier!

How big is too big?

• If you’re sending a file via email, keeping it under 10MB is a good guideline.
• If it’s an image to be posted on the web, it should definitely be under 100KB.
• A PDF or other file to be downloaded from the web should ideally be under 5MB or so.

File size factoids

• 1 kilobyte (KB) = about 1000 bytes
• 1 megabyte (MB) = about 1 000 000 bytes, or 1000 KB
• 1 gigabyte (GB) = about 1 000 000 000 bytes, or 1000MB
• A short plain-text document is about 1KB
• A four-minute compressed MP3 file is about 5.5 MB
• Apple’s newest iMacs come with 1TB (that’s terabyte, 1000GB ) hard drives