everyday mac tools

Finder is slow to open a folder with thousands of files

· 6 min read

When a folder holds thousands of files, Finder has to read every entry and, in icon or gallery view, draw a preview of each one before the window settles. Switch that folder to list view, turn off icon previews and “Calculate all sizes” in View Options, and most large folders become usable again. If the folder lives on a network drive, or you only need one file out of it, it is often quicker to go around Finder altogether.

What Finder is doing while you wait

Opening a folder looks like one action, but Finder does several jobs for every item in it: read the name, size, dates and kind, sort the whole list, and then draw it. How much extra work there is depends on the view.

  • Icon and gallery view show a preview of each file’s contents. For images, videos and PDFs, macOS has to open each file to render its thumbnail. In a folder of several thousand photos or scans, this is usually most of the wait.
  • List view with “Calculate all sizes” switched on walks through every subfolder to add up its size, which on a deep folder can take longer than everything else combined.
  • Sorting and grouping need the full list before anything can appear in order, which is why a big folder can sit blank and then fill all at once.

You can see which job is the expensive one. Open Activity Monitor, sort by % CPU, and then open the folder. If Finder or a process with “QuickLook” or “Thumbnail” in its name climbs to the top, previews are the cost.

Switch the folder to list view and turn off previews

These settings apply per folder, so you can make only the problem folder lean and leave the rest alone.

  1. Open the folder and wait out the first load.
  2. Choose View, as List (Command-2).
  3. Choose View, Show View Options (Command-J).
  4. Tick Always open in list view at the top.
  5. Untick Show icon preview. Files show generic icons by type instead of thumbnails.
  6. Untick Calculate all sizes.
  7. If the folder uses groups, choose View, Use Groups to turn them off. That is one less thing Finder has to compute before drawing.

Close the folder and open it again. The second open is the fair test, because thumbnails already generated are cached for a while and can make any view look faster than it will be tomorrow.

The Use as Defaults button at the bottom of View Options applies the current settings to every folder that has not been customized. That is worth doing if you prefer list view anyway; if you like icon view for everyday folders, leave it and keep the lean settings for the big ones.

Column view is a reasonable alternative. It only previews the file you select, in the rightmost column, rather than every file in the folder.

When the folder is on a network or external drive

On a network share, every piece of information Finder asks for is a round trip over the network, so a folder that opens in a moment locally can take a long time from a file server. Two things help.

First, the list view settings above matter even more, because each skipped preview is a file Finder does not have to pull across the network.

Second, macOS writes a hidden .DS_Store file into folders to remember their view settings. Apple suggests stopping that on network volumes as a way to speed up browsing them, and Stop .DS_Store files appearing on external and network drives walks through the one Terminal command involved and how to undo it.

For an external spinning hard disk, the drive itself is often the limit: reading thousands of scattered files is slow work for a mechanical disk. The same view settings help; beyond that, the fix is to split the folder.

Split the folder so it stops happening

Finder slows down in proportion to what it has to show, so a folder of a few hundred items stays quick even on an old Mac. Finder has a built-in way to break a big folder up.

  1. In list view, sort by Date Added or Date Created. Add either column from View Options if it is not showing.
  2. Click the first file from one month or year, then Shift-click the last one.
  3. Choose File, New Folder with Selection (Control-Command-N) and name the folder, such as “2025-03”.

Repeat for each period. For a folder of mixed file types, sorting by Kind and grouping each type into its own folder works the same way.

If the folder is your Downloads folder or something like it, Tidy the Downloads folder without losing anything has a fuller routine. Crumb also has an Organize tool that tidies a messy folder by type, if you would rather not do it by hand.

Getting one file out without opening the folder

Often you do not want to browse the folder at all; you want one file from it. There are faster routes than waiting for Finder to draw everything.

Terminal. ls lists names without generating a single preview, and grep narrows them:

ls ~/Pictures/Export | grep -i invoice

Once you have the name, open opens the file directly in its usual app:

open ~/Pictures/Export/invoice-0412.pdf

Spotlight or a scoped Finder search. If the folder is indexed, Spotlight finds the file by name without listing the folder first. Search inside one folder only on a Mac shows how to limit Finder’s search to that folder, though Finder still opens the folder to do it.

A catalog-based file search. Everywhere is a Mac file search app that catalogs every file on the Mac once and then answers as you type, so it never has to ask Finder to list the folder. Typing invoice path:Export shows only matching names whose folder path contains “Export”. Space previews a result, Command-C copies its full path, and Command-T opens Terminal at its folder. Command-Return reveals it in Finder, which brings you back to Finder’s speed, so for a very large folder the other shortcuts are the better finish. It searches names and paths, not the text inside files, and it does not make Finder itself any faster.

Questions

Why is the folder fast one day and slow the next? Thumbnails are cached, and the cache is not permanent. The first open after a restart, or after many new files arrive, can be slow again in icon view. List view without previews stays consistent.

Finder froze completely. How do I get it back? Hold Option, right-click the Finder icon in the Dock, and choose Relaunch. Your open windows come back, and the next time you open the big folder, switch it to list view before doing anything else.

Will deleting the folder’s .DS_Store file speed it up? On a local drive, not noticeably. It resets the folder’s view settings, which is only useful if they have become strange. The speed comes from what the view asks Finder to draw.

Does the number of files matter, or their size? Mostly the number. Finder does work per item, so ten thousand small files are slower to open than a hundred large ones. File size matters only when previews are on, because bigger images and videos take longer to render.