Folders or tags? How to organise anything you save
Folders answer where a thing lives, tags answer what it's about. Use folders for the one home, tags for the three other ways you'll look for it. With examples.
TLDR
- Folders answer “where does this live?” Every save gets exactly one.
- Tags answer “what else is this?” A save can have as many as it needs.
- Start with a few broad folders and almost no tags. Add a tag the second time you wish you had it.
- If you catch yourself making the same folder in three places, that folder should have been a tag.
The short answer
Use both, for different jobs.
A folder is a place. The Northbrew landing page lives in Work → Landing pages. It can’t also live in Inspiration → Dark mode, because a thing is only ever in one place.
A tag is a label. That same landing page can be #dark-mode, #pricing and #long-form at the same time, and show up when you look for any of them.
People get stuck because they try to do everything with one. All folders, and you end up with Dark mode folders inside Landing pages, Ads and Emails. All tags, and you have 400 of them, half spelled two ways (#darkmode, #dark-mode, #Dark Mode 🫠).
When a folder is the right call
- The thing has one obvious home. A client, a project, a trip. Madrid, May is a folder.
- You’d browse it. You’ll open Paid social → Meta → Carousels and scroll. Folders are for browsing.
- You’d share it as a unit. Planning Mexico City with your partner? Send them the folder.
Nest them if you like. Three levels deep is usually plenty. More than that and you’re filing, not finding.
When a tag is the right call
- It cuts across folders.
#dark-modeapplies to ads, emails and landing pages. That’s a tag. - It’s a quality, not a place.
#good-copy,#steal-this,#funny. - It’s a status.
#to-review,#used-in-q3. Tags come off as easily as they go on.
A setup that works for most people
- Three to six top-level folders, one per big chunk of your life or work. Work, Side project, Home, Trips.
- A folder per type of thing inside work, if you save a lot of it. Ads, Landing pages, Emails, Onboarding.
- No tags on day one. Seriously.
- Add a tag when you go looking for something across folders and can’t find it. That’s the tag you needed. Now you know.
The swipe file template has a full folder structure you can copy if you’d rather not think about it.
What about search?
Honestly, search makes a lot of this matter less. If your tool searches the words on the page, in the PDF and in the screenshot, you don’t need a tag for every topic. You need folders for browsing and a few tags for the things search can’t know, like “this one’s good”.
That’s how Savepad’s spaces, folders and tags work: nested folders, as many tags as you want, and search that reads everything you saved, including the text inside images. Stack a folder and two tags as filters and you’re down to the six things you wanted.
If your bookmarks are where the mess is, start with how to organise your bookmarks. Same idea, applied to the bookmarks bar.