Use Smart Folders to organize assets automatically – Showpad Help Center

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Smart Folders are a special type of folder that you can add to your Experiences to organize your content. As the name suggests, Smart Folders distinguish themselves from regular folders by their ability to "scan" content for file type, properties, specific tags, and sources, and automatically pull in assets that match the set criteria.

Smart Folders can significantly reduce the time you would otherwise spend on dropping content in the right Experiences and folders. Because Smart Folders are designed to organize content automatically, regular folders created manually cannot be converted into Smart Folders. Both regular and Smart Folders live side by side in your Showpad instance to provide different ways to organize content based on your team's needs.

The order in which assets are displayed for users within Smart Folders and asset blocks is case-insensitive, shows characters and symbols first before filenames that start with a digit, and groups digits together. For example, “a”=“A”, “Asset.PDF” will be displayed before “1Asset.PDF”, and “1Asset.PDF”, “2Asset.PDF” will be displayed before “10Asset.PDF”.

Key Benefits

A Smart Folder only contains content
Add assets automatically in this Smart Folder
Reduce time by automatically adding content in an Experience
Filtering is based on File type, Properties, Tags, or Sources

You need this to succeed

Administrator access on Showpad's Online Platform
A well-thought-out plan for your content structure
Tags added to your content to easily allow Smart Folders to classify the content

The quick way to awesomeness

Open the Experience Builder and open or create an Experience
Create a Smart Folder
Change the icon, add information, configure the visibility
Define the parameters to populate content automatically

Do this step by step

Set up the base parameters

Navigate to the Experience Builder and select the Experience where you want to add the Smart Folder.
Click the appropriate folders to navigate to the location where you want to insert the Smart Folder. Open the Add drop-down menu. Click Add Smart Folder.
Click the Upload icon button to choose a custom icon for your Smart Folder.
Enter the Folder label.
If required, enter a description.
If necessary, select the following check boxes:
- Hide label in Experience: Select this check box to hide the Experience name. This is useful when you have created custom icons for your folders that already have the folder name in the icon.
- Hide folder in Kiosk Mode: Select this check box to hide the folder when a user enables Kiosk Mode.

Set up the content selection criteria

Set the rules that the content must meet to be pulled into the Smart Folder. Note that you need to set at least one. You can set up different criteria to narrow down the content that is pulled in.
- File Type: Select which file types will be pulled in.
- Property: Select the properties the assets need to have.
- Tag: Select the tags the assets need to have.
- Source: Select the source assets must come from.
Alternatively, you can use a saved filter. To do so, open the Sort files on the drop-down list and select the desired filter.
Use the matching of tags to filter files that have ALL the selected tags. ANY (some) of the selected tags. Or NONE of the selected tags. If an asset has a tag from this field, it won't be displayed.
Open the Sort files on the drop-down list and choose the sorting criteria. Sort your files in respectively ascending or descending order. Enter the maximum number of assets in your Smart Folder. When you’re ready, click the Save button.
Your Smart Folder won't have a label if you enabled Hide label in Experience. Checking off Hide in kiosk mode will make the folder not visible to anyone while they are viewing that Experience in kiosk mode.