Folders in addition to tags for resource management.

Art Library, Sounds, Character Sheets, Handouts. Adding this back due to the new voting system. All these items need either a Tag tree or 'folder system' for those of us who can't organize data the same way as the system currently functions. I'm a visual sorter. Tags are cool and all, but for a lot of us they don't organize the way we we process data.

+1! While I have begrudgingly used the tags, I would much prefer a folder structure.

Tags are great for certain things, but a folder structure is much easier for me to organize assets.

Excellent suggestion. It would also be nice for players to be able to use the tag/folders too, at least for searching for that one bald knight they fought so long ago or that NPC who was a gun nut... This would also help make bestiaries possible so players could remember from week to week (or month to month) strategies and tactics based on enemy stats.

As it is now my players tend to get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of build up in the Journal Tab.

to use folders (and even subfolders) in journal tab is my longtime dream! I am Defiinitely supporting this.

+1

Great idea. Folders and Subfolders in Characters and Handout tab of the Sidebar would be a great addition to help GMs to sort their handouts, characters and monsters.
Interestingly, consistent with the idea of playlists in the jukebox (see the Matt B.'s Jukebox Layout, Multiple Playlists suggestion).

Meh. Tags work just fine.

I've thought about why I would like folders and for me, it's the visual clutter that gets in the way. If everything was hidden, it may not be so bad. However, the other reason, is because I tend to forget how I tagged something. So, if I bad guy and I can't remember the tagging, I can generally remember what folder s/he was in.

What I've mainly done is make t.o.c. Handout... It, sorta, helps. That said, I support this as it will help with clutter :-)

Folders and Subfolders would be great, but I would also suggest to apply it with rollable tables as well! I've been suggesting an alphabetical order to the latest, but having folders would be even better!

I repeat again my suggestion of enabling a 'tag browse' system where all your tags are shown at the top of the pane for whatever you're looking at/for, and you click tags off/on to filter the results below. You can't forget your tags because the tags are all there for you to see.

I remember reading how the tag system was important to have instead of the folder system. Can't remember exactly why however I do believe that the tag system should be collapsible at the very least. If we could have tags filtered in a more accessible way it might be helpful. (Such as Genkitties idea).

Yeah, while folders would be nice I think genkittys suggestion would be a better solution. Would also be good to be able to get a "list" of your already used tags when you are in fact tagging things.

I think folders would be more useful than a tag management system, but either would be very useful.

Aside from the fact that some of us visually sort rather than tag sort, it's the tag editing that's the most annoying. Simply dragging and dropping stuff into a folder, speeds up handling massive amounts of tokens. Bulk tagging is really slow especially when: You're limited to the amounts you can do at once. The slow refresh rate to see if the tag has stuck after it's been added. The limited view space of the browser window and the fact it doesn't have a 'list' mode format. The slow scroll speed through the list.

I don't buy stuff from the marketplace now because it is too much of a pain to get it all tagged.

Adam C. said:

Aside from the fact that some of us visually sort rather than tag sort, it's the tag editing that's the most annoying. Simply dragging and dropping stuff into a folder, speeds up handling massive amounts of tokens. Bulk tagging is really slow especially when: You're limited to the amounts you can do at once. The slow refresh rate to see if the tag has stuck after it's been added. The limited view space of the browser window and the fact it doesn't have a 'list' mode format. The slow scroll speed through the list.

I don't buy stuff from the marketplace now because it is too much of a pain to get it all tagged.

Tbh having the Tags being collapsable would solve this issue. You don't need to have them be folders. Dragging a tag onto a icon should do enough. Its less hassle. IMO opening 2-3 windows, clicking edit, scouring through tags lists to find the correct one, it can all be avoided.

Simply having a more "Visual" way of tagging would be better.

The only issue I have with the idea of just collapsing all the tags is that it doesn't capture one of the primary differences between tags and folders.

Folders are inherently hierarchical.

As I've mentioned before, Tags are concept-centric with reference to a particular item; they are traits that allow you to find all the members of a set based on a trait. (And all the other set theory operations of intersection, union, difference, etc given a sufficiently advanced implementation). With Tags, you traverse from the maximum set, to the minimum set.

Folders are partition-centric with reference to a particular ordering or path; they are successive refinement via minimal set. With Folders, you can traverse from a minimal set of important concepts to another minimal set of important concepts.

The Aaron said:

The only issue I have with the idea of just collapsing all the tags is that it doesn't capture one of the primary differences between tags and folders.

Folders are inherently hierarchical.

As I've mentioned before, Tags are concept-centric with reference to a particular item; they are traits that allow you to find all the members of a set based on a trait. (And all the other set theory operations of intersection, union, difference, etc given a sufficiently advanced implementation). With Tags, you traverse from the maximum set, to the minimum set.

Folders are partition-centric with reference to a particular ordering or path; they are successive refinement via minimal set. With Folders, you can traverse from a minimal set of important concepts to another minimal set of important concepts.

Then by this account all I suggest is an easier way to tag things. Typing out tags etc is a real choir in it self. If I had a way to mass-tag or drag and drop tags to make it quicker and easier, I would be happier with actually using the tag system more often.

Saevar L. said:

Then by this account all I suggest is an easier way to tag things. Typing out tags etc is a real choir in it self. If I had a way to mass-tag or drag and drop tags to make it quicker and easier, I would be happier with actually using the tag system more often.

You're talking about creating the relationships, I'm talking about traversing them. The creation process is fairly analogous. The difference is in traversal.

With Tags, you are picking from the vast sea of all your tags. Yes, you can directly type in whatever tag you want (if you remember it, if you have easy access to a keyboard, if you aren't holding something in your other hand, etc), or you can select if from a list of every tag you've ever used, conveniently sorted by number of times used (lowest to highest???) and alphabetically.

With Folders, you are picking from a small set of your highest level concepts. It doesn't require remembering all your concepts, or even remembering your highest level concepts. It doesn't require parsing and discarding every possible relationship until you find the right one, you merely need to parse the concepts that are relevant to the current point in your traversal.

Folders also make it trivial to expose dependent relationships, for example: Dominic the Bold is an ally in some scenes, but an adversary in others. Folders also make it trivial to make a transient relationship, for example: just because Johann is infected with vampirism in this scene, doesn't mean I want to see him on a list of all vampires in the campaign. Folders also make it trivial to expose the relative importance of various relationships, and change that relationship across different folders, essentially across different desires, for example: in one scene it is very important that Clair is a psychic sensitive who will be targeted by the Intellect Devourer, in another the fact that she is an ally is more important.

I think both Tags and Folders have their place. We already have Tags, and the people who like Tags and structure their relationships in a manner that makes Tags an ideal categorization strategy are pretty happy with that. We don't have Folders yet, and those of us that like Folders and structure our relationships in a manner that makes Folders the ideal categorization strategy are pretty excited about the idea of having Folders.

Tags still have a place, we will still use Tags, there are some great things that can be done very well with Tags, we don't want to get rid of Tags, and we don't look down our noses at people that like Tags.


Just don't look down your noses at those of us that like Folders.

The Aaron said:

Saevar L. said:

Then by this account all I suggest is an easier way to tag things. Typing out tags etc is a real choir in it self. If I had a way to mass-tag or drag and drop tags to make it quicker and easier, I would be happier with actually using the tag system more often.

You're talking about creating the relationships, I'm talking about traversing them. The creation process is fairly analogous. The difference is in traversal.

With Tags, you are picking from the vast sea of all your tags. Yes, you can directly type in whatever tag you want (if you remember it, if you have easy access to a keyboard, if you aren't holding something in your other hand, etc), or you can select if from a list of every tag you've ever used, conveniently sorted by number of times used (lowest to highest???) and alphabetically.

With Folders, you are picking from a small set of your highest level concepts. It doesn't require remembering all your concepts, or even remembering your highest level concepts. It doesn't require parsing and discarding every possible relationship until you find the right one, you merely need to parse the concepts that are relevant to the current point in your traversal.

Folders also make it trivial to expose dependent relationships, for example: Dominic the Bold is an ally in some scenes, but an adversary in others. Folders also make it trivial to make a transient relationship, for example: just because Johann is infected with vampirism in this scene, doesn't mean I want to see him on a list of all vampires in the campaign. Folders also make it trivial to expose the relative importance of various relationships, and change that relationship across different folders, essentially across different desires, for example: in one scene it is very important that Clair is a psychic sensitive who will be targeted by the Intellect Devourer, in another the fact that she is an ally is more important.

I think both Tags and Folders have their place. We already have Tags, and the people who like Tags and structure their relationships in a manner that makes Tags an ideal categorization strategy are pretty happy with that. We don't have Folders yet, and those of us that like Folders and structure our relationships in a manner that makes Folders the ideal categorization strategy are pretty excited about the idea of having Folders.

Tags still have a place, we will still use Tags, there are some great things that can be done very well with Tags, we don't want to get rid of Tags, and we don't look down our noses at people that like Tags.


Just don't look down your noses at those of us that like Folders.

Ah I am unsure if I have upset you or this is just trying to make a well-rounded point. Either way I do agree with the tag system, its just the means to tagging them is fairly clunky in my opinion. I find it a hassle to tag them after a while, I just feel like maybe having a better way of accessing the ability to tag a particular item would be helpful.

Maybe something such as mass-selection of certain items and then just having to tag them once? Instead of having to tag them one by one. There is alot of items and un-tagging/re-tagging is a choir. I by no means wish to do away with the tag system in the favor of another. If the Roll20 team prefer their tags then I merely ask they make it more user friendly in how we apply them.

=D Sorry, it's hard to judge tone in text. For the record, anyone that knows me personally would tell you that I never get mad at anyone, with the exception of my ex-wife. =D

Generally, I was just trying to put forth as well rounded a discussion about the differences between Tags and Folders as possible. That last line was for the community at large. There are quite a few people whose opinion on any matter is "you don't agree with me, therefore you are wrong."

I like Tags for certain things and I'd up-vote the crap out of a suggestion to add full discreet math operations to their use, and exposing them to the API. In fact, if they added a system for inter-tag ranking, they would have de facto folders.

I personally don't like tags. I'm much more of a folder guy. It's just more easy to me to organize things that way.

It's also true that tagging does need work, I tried using them, I ended up using three differnet tags to mean the same thing, always slighty different spelling etc, because I couldn't remember what I had used before. So I get what you're saying when you say easier tagging is required.

But why does it have to be "either easier tagging or folders"? This is the suggestion forum, just make a new thread for easier tagging, I'll even gonna vote for it too. But please don't come here and say "No don't do this suggestion, do X instead it's way better". At the moment 85 people think it's a great idea to have folders, and it's even leading the ranking by a fair margin (next one has 67 votes) so I'd say there's definitely need and desire for folders.

What I'm worried about is how will folders and tags interact? If something is tagged 'Orc' and 'Mage', will there suddenly be Orc and Mage folders, with the item appearing in both of them? Would dragging an untagged item into a folder also tag the item with that tag? These would be nice and things I could get behind.

On the other hand, I see the possibility of tags and folders being utterly unrelated and I have no memory of what dang folder I put something in and not being able to find it because now all my stuff is in folders and I can't tag search anymore. That would make a very sad cat.

So, I am all for psuedofolders that assist with tagging. I am not for real folders that partition my stuff up. I'd really really really like to have that tag filtering interface I mentioned upthread :>

Why would folders inhibit tagging or tag searching? OSX Mavericks now has tagging and still uses folders—if I search for a tag, it looks across all folders. Not that Roll20 is OSX, but I merely use that as an example of the functionality already existing elsewhere, so uncertain as to why it couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't exist here, too. :)

So, I'm not sure I understand the concern.

One reason tags are annoying: you can't tag PC character sheets as "PC" and NPC character sheets as "NPC" and then do a search for just the "PC" sheets. It brings up both...

GenKitty said:

What I'm worried about is how will folders and tags interact? If something is tagged 'Orc' and 'Mage', will there suddenly be Orc and Mage folders, with the item appearing in both of them? Would dragging an untagged item into a folder also tag the item with that tag? These would be nice and things I could get behind.

On the other hand, I see the possibility of tags and folders being utterly unrelated and I have no memory of what dang folder I put something in and not being able to find it because now all my stuff is in folders and I can't tag search anymore. That would make a very sad cat.

So, I am all for psuedofolders that assist with tagging. I am not for real folders that partition my stuff up. I'd really really really like to have that tag filtering interface I mentioned upthread :>

As G V. already asked, why do they have to inhibit each other. Nobody here wants to force anybody to use folders. If you don't like folders, keep all your stuff in the root folder and use tags. => works just like it does now.

Just turning tags into folders was the idea of people who don't like the ideas of folders (from what I've seen), the Suggestion deals with actual folders that exist in parallel to them. Honestly just turning tags into folders isn't a good idea as there's no way to nest them into one another.

Or you could use tags and folders together.
"Mogh the Powerful" is tagged as "Orc" and "Mage" and was moved into the folder "Tower of the Purple Sun/NPCs/Enemies/Level 4/Room 22" ... if you type in orc or mage into the tag search it finds it. If you go to Tower of the Purple Sun/NPCs/Enemies/Level 4/Room 22 you find it.

Not sure how having more options makes the things you already have work any less good.

I think the problem is that the folder-style interface would be really helpful for tags, but if both folders and tags exist as seperate systems then they both can't have the same interface. That means, as Quatar said, it works just like it does now (which many people don't think is the best way).

A far better solution would be to have a single hybrid system. For the most part, tags can be used as folders (where the filesystem being displayed has lots of symlinks). The set of currently selected tags stands in for the working directory; tags which are set on any of the items with all the selected tags stand in for subfolders; items which have all of the selected tags are the contents of the directory (possibly with an option to only display those items which have EXACTLY the selected tags, so you don't show the items deeper down the tree).

The only difference between this and a folder system is that folders enforce order: Tower/NPCs/Enemies/Level4/Room22/Mogh is not the same as NPCs/Enemies/Level4/Tower/Room22/Mogh (and certainly not the same as .../Allies/.../Mogh; you'll need another copy if Mogh goes rogue). While I don't necessarily find that ordering important (in fact, I find it problematic for sufficiently deep trees), I appreciate that people like Aaron do, so I think the missing back-end feature (with the folder-style interface being a purely front-end feature) is the ability to define order relations among the tags. So if NPCs is defined as a child of Tower, then the top-level view will show the Tower tag but not the NPCs tag (but the Tower view will show the NPCs tag).

I don't know that I described that well. Maybe I'll just make a mock-up when I'm inevitably bored and avoiding doing actual work tomorrow.

So the mockup is pretty craptastic, but it gets the general idea across about how a hybrid system could work: https://github.com/manveti/roll20/blob/master/folders.htm

yep yep - this'd be great.

@manveti, if you moved an item from one folder to another, would the tags change or would they keep accumulating?

In the system I was thinking of when I made the mockup, because it only has one view open at a time, you can't really move an item from one tag to another. Instead, you'd move it to "..", removing the deepest tag, then move it from there down into another tag. That said, if I were going to make a system which supported multiple views, I'd probably default to add a tag if you drop it in the tags view and move if you drop it in the items/folders view, with the ability to switch to the other behavior by holding down some modifier key.

I have no idea what you just said. That is probably a good indication of why I prefer folders.

Folders in the jukebox tab.......ahhh to dream... :)

I just got used to the tag system only to find out my players could not search by tags! So I agree the system needs an overhaul...

Folders please, it's just easier for me to think that way after 30 years of using windows.

Sylverlokk said:

Folders please, it's just easier for me to think that way after 30 years of using windows.

or just about any other operating system.... =D

Folders, Folders everywhere.

My tags are so messed up currently. Half my assets have mis spelling in them, or i can't remember what I named something. I'm also someone who doesn't buy stuff in the marketplace unless i can download it, because assett management is such a pain.

I believe this was suggested many times over already. I so wish it would happen, I'm lost in all my stuff and have trouble setting anything up nowadays.

Definitely folders thanks, the tags system is very unwieldy when you have lots of items and a bad memory.

Throwing in my vote for a folder based system.

Just a thought for the devs:

If your content delivery network does not offer the idea of "directories" (I've seen a few that don't) you may be able to quickly and easily create a database of "logical" folders for content, where the association of "parent directory" and "child directory" is kept in the app database. Contents for each folder would then be itemized by the logical directory id, and would link to your content delivery network by whichever id you choose.

I think that's doable in a few weeks, and would not require you to alter any existing structure in your current database. All it would do is just add the association tables and populate all current assets into them.

Have fun developing. :-)

+1
I use lots of character sheets and handouts in my campaigns, as well as a lot of uploaded images. All I need is a collapsible system in my journal.
Player Characters

Puppet Master said:

+1
I use lots of character sheets and handouts in my campaigns, as well as a lot of uploaded images. All I need is a collapsible system in my journal.

I'll just chime in that I also need some way of visually managing my journal specifically in addition to the images. So many sheets..... and my handouts are growing also. Tag search helps some but isn't enough.

+1 I prefer tags over folders, but anything would be better than nothing, especially for the sfx tab.

+1. It is hard to remember all the different tags. Folders are better for me too.

+1 Me too!

I just want to throw out there that I know a lot of people are requesting folders and a collapsible system which I would really want, however, something that would be a simple fix and make a difference in the mean time is if in my journal there was more that 2 sections (characters and Handouts). It would help me out a lot if there could be some more divisions. Example: NPC's and Creatures. Even better yet would be a system where I could add and name my own dividers.

You can make your own 'folder system' in the journals with some creativity.
Here's the version I gave to my party: http://imgur.com/a/mKIbq
They each have their own version and can't access the personal journals from other players.

Nice work around, Patrick!

Thanks. It takes some time to set up initially. But once you have it it's easy to maintain and update.