Some time ago, I wrote Multifolder, a lightweight macOS app that lets you add multiple source folders to the Finder's built-in Smart Folders. It served as a quick-and-dirty way of creating semantic views on my file system that collected similar files across multiple directory structures; desktop wallpapers across folders of art from multiple artists whose work I've enjoyed through Patreon over the years, for example.

As I've become used to the kinds of workflows that these secondary views on my file system offer, I've found myself exploring other, richer tools--I want Photos-like library experiences for managing all my files and Smart Folders are a poor approximation.

With that in mind, I'm making a few changes.

Retiring Multifolder

I'm going to stop maintaining Multifolder and have archived the GitHub repository. Keeping up with Apple platforms is an increasingly onerous task and I'm acutely aware how much time and energy it takes. Multifolder releases will sill be available to download through GitHub for anyone who wants to use it, but I won't be testing it on new versions of macOS or fixing bugs.

If you're interested in taking on maintenance of the project, please feel free to get in touch (or just fork the repository).

Introducing Folders

Folders started it's life as a spiritual successor to Multifolder, but I'm starting to realise it can be so much more. It's the latest evolution in my thinking around providing a fast managed library experience around all of your files.

Folders is available for macOS today in a very early TestFlight build. It looks a lot like Photos, allowing you to add multiple directories to the sidebar and giving you unified views of all multimedia files within the selected directory structure--entries in the sidebar serve as filters on the directory tree. Over time, I hope to add rich filtering, search, different default views, and support for tags. If you think this might be useful to you, please feel free to give the beta a try and share your feedback.

For myself, I've already found Folders to be a great front-end for my comic and magazine collection, desktop backgrounds, YouTube archives, and software development assets.

Under the hood, Folders is already doing a lot of work to ensure it's fast and responsive--it maintains an index of all the files in your file system and uses this for fast queries to avoid needing to hit the file system all the time. It also uses eschews SwiftUI for AppKit as, unfortunately, SwiftUI still can't handle these volumes of data.

While I've not been using my iPad much lately, I think there's a lot of potential for an iPad build of Folders--the Files experience is significantly more limited than Finder and I've often found myself wanting more.