Find Empty Folders is a free, lightweight macOS utility that scans any directory on your Mac and surfaces every folder that contains absolutely nothing — no files, no subfolders, no hidden cruft.
What is Find Empty Folders?
Find Empty Folders is a native Mac application that recursively walks a chosen directory tree and presents a clean, selectable list of every zero-content folder it discovers. It was written by Thomas Tempel and has been quietly useful to Mac power-users for years — the kind of tool you install once and reach for every few months without ever needing to read a manual.
The premise sounds trivial until you inherit a 15,000-folder project archive, migrate a home directory to a new machine, or finish a big Lightroom cull and wonder why your filesystem still feels bloated. Empty folders are invisible noise: Finder never flags them, Spotlight ignores them, and du returns zero bytes for each one. Find Empty Folders makes them visible so you can decide what to do with them.
What does Find Empty Folders do best?
It excels at ruthless, accurate detection with zero false positives — a folder has to be genuinely empty, not just appear empty, before it lands in the results list.
The workflow is about as frictionless as it gets: point the app at a root directory, click Scan, and within seconds you have a scrollable list of offending paths. You can select all, select none, or cherry-pick individual entries, then delete the chosen folders in one shot. There is no wizard, no preferences pane, no subscription upsell. I have run it against NAS-mounted volumes with hundreds of thousands of directories and it has never stalled or crashed on me.
One subtlety worth knowing: the scanner treats a folder as non-empty only if it contains at least one visible or invisible file — so a folder full of other empty folders is itself treated as effectively empty and included in the results. This is exactly the behaviour you want when cleaning up a deep scaffolding tree left by a build system or a cancelled Xcode project.
Is Find Empty Folders free?
Yes — Find Empty Folders is free to download directly from the developer's site with no nag screens, no in-app purchases, and no account required.
It is also available via Homebrew Cask (brew install --cask find-empty-folders), which makes it trivially easy to pull into a new-machine setup script. The developer has maintained the project independently for a long time, which is worth appreciating — and worth mentioning if you find it useful.
Who should use Find Empty Folders?
Anyone who manages large directory trees will find it immediately valuable — photographers pruning Lightroom export scaffolding, developers clearing out stale build artifacts, sysadmins auditing shared drives, or anyone migrating a home folder from one Mac to another and wanting a clean slate.
It is also a solid complement to apps like DaisyDisk or OmniDiskSweeper when you are doing a deep-clean pass. Those tools find what is taking up space; Find Empty Folders finds what is taking up mental space — the phantom folder hierarchy that makes tab-complete and Finder sidebars feel cluttered even though the total disk cost is essentially zero.
It is not aimed at casual users who never venture outside their Downloads folder. If your file hygiene is already handled by a cloud provider that collapses empty directories automatically, you may never need it.
What are the best Find Empty Folders alternatives?
For most users there is no direct GUI alternative that does exactly this job on macOS — which is part of why the app has lasted this long.
The closest substitute is a Terminal one-liner: find /path -type d -empty -print will list them, and appending -delete will remove them. That works perfectly, but it requires comfort at the command line and offers no opportunity to review before deleting. CleanMyMac X can remove empty folders as part of a broader scan, but it bundles the feature inside a paid suite and gives you less granular control. For pure empty-folder discovery with a GUI and selective deletion, Find Empty Folders remains the dedicated choice on Mac.
How does Find Empty Folders compare to CleanMyMac X?
Find Empty Folders does one thing and does it transparently; CleanMyMac X does dozens of things and charges accordingly.
If you already subscribe to CleanMyMac X, its Space Lens and System Junk modules will catch empty folders as part of a sweep — you do not need a second tool. But if you want a free, auditable, no-side-effects utility that only touches what you explicitly select, Find Empty Folders is the cleaner choice. I trust it more for sensitive directories precisely because there is no background process, no cloud component, and no ambiguity about what it is about to delete.
