The answer is a little different depending on if you are deleting files from a Flash Drive or your PC hard drive. I hope this helps:

Flash Drive:

Flash Drives typically don’t have a Recycle Bin, so when files are deleted it is permanent. If you want to determine the amount of space you will free up on a flash drive after deletion, you can do so by changing a few things in the way you view the files on the flash drive.

You can see the total size of all files on the flash drive by clicking View in the menu bar and selecting Status Bar. To see the size of the individual files, you need to make sure the window options are set to Detail view. You also do this in the View menu:


At the bottom of the window, you will now see the number of files (objects) and the amount of disk space they are using:

You can sort the files by Name, Size, Type, or Date Modified by clicking on the column heading (Note: Clicking a column heading again will toggle the order of that column between ascending and descending order):


And, you can choose the files you want to delete. You can either choose them by a group or selectively. To choose a group of files, hold down the Shift key and click on the first file in the group. Keep holding down the Shift key, and click the last file in the group. Now, all files in between the first and last file will be selected:


In the Image 4 example I held down the Shift key, clicked on ‘Sample File (3)’, and while still holding down the Shift Key, clicked on ‘Sample File (9)’. Now you can see in the Status Bar, I have selected 7 Objects, and the total size is 15 MB. (For reference: 1,000 KB = 1 MB and 1,000 MB = 1 GB).

If you want to selectively choose files, you would use the same concept as the Shift key, but instead you would use the Ctrl key:

In the Image 5 example I have kept the Ctrl key held down while I clicked on every other file. The Status Bar now shows that I have selected 4 objects totaling 390 KB. (Note: When using the Ctrl key, clicking the file again, will toggle the selection off.)

Recycle Bin:

In actuality, you free up no disk space when you delete files. All you really do is move them from your active files to the Recycle Bin - but they are still stored on your hard drive and still taking up disk space. An assigned percentage of disk space is set aside for the Recycle Bin. Once the Bin reaches that limit, it starts permanently deleting older files.

You can see the percent of disk space that is assigned by right-clicking Recycle Bin and choosing Properties. The assigned percentage is on the Global tab.I think the default setting is 10%. You can change that according to your own preferences and size of disk drive. For example, I have a terabyte drive (1,000 GB), so 10% would be 100 GB, which is a ridiculous amount to set aside for deleted files. I reduced the size of my Bin to 1%, which is still large at 10 GB.

The only way to actually free up hard drive space is to permanently delete files from the Recycle Bin. You can delete all files in the Bin by right-clicking on the Recycle Bin and choosing "Empty Recycle Bin". Or you can selectively delete by opening the Bin and deleting the files of your choice.

You can see the total size of all files the same as you did with the Flash Drive (Images 1 & 2). You can sort the files by Date Deleted or by Size by clicking those column headings (Image 3). And you can choose the files to be deleted (Images 4 & 5). Delete using the Delete key.