Calculate Google Drive Folder Size Using `rclone`

Google Drive lacks a very basic feature: calculating folder size. There is no solution in the web interface to view the total size of a given directory. There are a couple of dubious looking online “folder size analyzers” request access permissions to your Google Drive and offer you the basic functionality of calculating folder size. While those apps, have a legitimate need for access permission to your account, you may consider given those permissions to random apps a questionable decision.

The (very) useful tool rclone, which provides rsync like interface to many cloud storage providers, implements this functionality. After configuring rclone to work with your Google Drive, use the size command to determine the size of a given folder:

$ rclone size "gdrive:Pictures/"
Total objects: 1421
Total size: 9.780 GBytes (10501374440 Bytes)

The size is calculated recursively. However, there is no simple way to display the size of each sub-directory recursively.