Nest a Shared Space's albums inside folders — group them by continent, trip or year, drag them where they belong, and give a space with twenty albums a shape every member can navigate.
A shared space fills up faster than a personal one
Space Albums gave every Shared Space its own Albums tab, and that was the right shape for five albums. It is the wrong shape for twenty-five. A space is filled by several people at once, so it accumulates faster than anything you organise alone — and the tab that felt tidy at the start of a year is a flat wall of covers by the end of it.
Sorting and searching help you find an album you already know the name of. They do not help you see what a space contains. That needs structure, and a flat list has none to offer.
Folders, and folders inside folders
Album folders are a real tree. A folder holds albums, and it holds other folders, as deep as you care to go — Europe holds Italy, Italy holds the Dolomites, and the albums sit wherever they make sense along the way. Folders and albums live side by side on the same tab, so nothing has to be filed before it can be found.
Each folder card carries a cover mosaic drawn from the albums beneath it and a count of what is inside, so a folder reads as a place rather than a label. A breadcrumb across the top of the tab shows where you are and takes you back up in one click.
Everything the Albums tab already did still works inside a folder: the same search box, the same sort, the same grouping and list controls. Folders add a dimension, they do not replace the one you had.
Editors arrange, everyone benefits
Creating, renaming, moving and deleting folders is an Editor's job, the same permission that already governs linking and creating albums in a space. Editors get a New folder button and can drag an album card straight onto a folder to file it. Viewers see the structure and browse it, but cannot rearrange the space under everyone else's feet.
Deleting a folder never deletes what is in it. The albums and subfolders it held are promoted up to where the folder was, so a mis-named folder can be removed without a moment's thought about what it might take with it.
Built for more than one person moving things at once
A shared space has several editors, and sooner or later two of them reorganise it in the same minute. Each move is serialised per space and re-checks the tree as it commits, so a folder cannot be dragged inside its own descendant and end up in a loop that nothing can reach. A folder deleted while someone else was busy filing an album into it fails that one write cleanly instead of leaving the album pointing at something that no longer exists.
None of this is visible when it works, which is the point. It is the difference between a structure you can trust to hold and one you check on.
On the phone as well
Folders are not a desktop-only convenience. The Gallery mobile app browses the same tree with the same breadcrumb, so a space organised on a laptop opens organised on a phone — which is where most people actually look at a shared space.
It pairs naturally with Bulk Add for getting a back catalogue into a space in the first place, and with Workflows for Shared Spaces for keeping it fed once the structure is there.
