Calculate Maximum Number of Files in a Directory on FAT32

The FAT32 file system just won’t die. Sometimes you need to support this old file system. But it has some serious limitations with respect to how many files can be held in a single directory — and that limit depends on how many characters long the filenames are!

Here is a handy calculator to let you know how many files can be created in the same directory on a FAT32 volume. Be sure to include the ‘.’ and the file extension in the number of characters you include in the filename.

Also beware that some characters need to be escaped in order to be encoded — for example ‘$’ or non-ascii unicode characters. Those will count as two or more chars depending on what encoding is used.