Display different icon for empty folders on network drives?

Question

I have to work with a lot of files on network drives. There are kind of "project directories" which are always organized in the same structure with sub-directories which are again divided in sub-directories.

Very often, those subdirectories are empty and it is quite frustrating and time consuming to open a sub-directory in Windows Explorer only to find that it is in fact empty.

Is there a way to avoid that? I could imagine having a separate Icon for empty folders which would show me directly that is makes no sense to open that folder. However, I am not the "owner" of those directories, so this should be a modification only done on my computer and should not necessarily effect other users.

Answer 1

With Windows7, Just change the folder view to Medium Icons or other view that display a larger icon. Windows7 will display empty folder with the 'Empty Folder' icon. then you can identifies those empty folders.

Answer 2

My guess is that it's not possible or preferable because of performance. When Windows builds the list of icons to show for a sub-directory it is doing so "on-demand" (ie you clicked on the parent). To walk all of the children folders and check if they have content could be an expensive operation (esp if there were hundreds or thousands of folders). If Windows did this normally it would be sending lots of read requests over the wire to look in directories the user may never traverse down. Waiting until you click on a sub-folder to get the next set of contents is the best way to keep the network traffic to a minimum.

Once you click on the folder Windows could change the icon but this would be bad from a UI perspective. It could also cache the fact that the sub-folder was empty but this could change with another user on the network adding content.