Fast Empty Folder Finder for Windows

How many empty folders are in your system? Leftovers from uninstalled programs, temporary folders that moved in to stay. Wouldn't it be great if someone wrote a simple tool that finds and deletes all that junk? Someone did: Fast Empty Folder Finder scans folders, directories, and entire drives for empty folders, displays them in a list with previews, and deletes those you select.

At 111.5KB, Fast Empty Folder Finder is compact, and since it's also portable freeware, it requires no installation but runs as soon as you click its executable file. It has a very simple but efficient, even elegant interface, with a plain main view anchored on the top by a toolbar with drop-down lists for Choose Locations and Options, including a pop-up file browser for adding locations; Scan Now, Delete Checked, and About buttons; and on the left, small icons for adding to the exclusion list and toggling the explorer panel.

We started with our Pictures Library. The program found two empty folders much more quickly than you could type or even say Fast Empty Folder Finder, and deleted them quickly, too, with confirmations before and after. This tool takes some pains to make sure you don't delete the wrong folders, not only analyzing the content to verify they're truly empty but letting you preview them to satisfy yourself. It made quick work of a 500GB media drive, finding several empty folders that we soon deleted. However, twice we ran it on the 60GB of files in our C: drive, and twice it stopped working. Though the drive held less overall, it held many, many times the number of files of the media drive, and it seems likely that we just fed it too much at one time. Given smaller bites, Fast Empty Folder Finder certainly lived up to its name.

Even with its apparent size limitations, we heartily recommend this small, free, portable tool, which does something fairly unique but unquestionably useful. It belongs on every portable USB toolkit, too. Since it's free, you have nothing to lose but your empty folders.