A tool I found while browsing Lifehacker looks like one that deserves a place in the productivity hall of fame. Remove Empty Directories or simply put, RED, enables you to scan for and remove empty folders on your hard drive. Those pesky folders have always been bugging me, and with the advanced features RED offers you can tweak what to delete exactly, so you really can go through your whole hard drive in minutes.

By default, folders with files with a 0kb size will also be marked empty, but any folders in the system directory will not be shown. Also, folders that only contain desktop.ini, temp files and thumbs.db files will also be marked empty. This is a good starting point but you can be much more creative and productive than this.

Lifehacker brings up an excellent real life example, music collections where songs from an album are deleted, but the folder and album art isn’t. This typically happens if you delete an album using a media player application which doesn’t delete the album’s folder. In this case your folder is likely to contain only picture files, but you want these deleted. You can include folders in your “empty” list which only contain jpg files for example, then after the scan you can select which of these you need and which you don’t.

This is one of those tools that should be a regular in your system maintenance tool belt, apart from the functions it offers, it looks good, is very light weight and works lightning fast, even with large directory structures.