Please bring back Folders
Comments
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Sorry if that was confusing. As we've mentioned a few times in this thread, we don't announce future plans publicly. I just recommended looking at the changelogs because it'll be the first place you hear about something like this. Right now folders aren't on the road map for 1Password accounts. We'd like to improve the way tags work and get them up to par with where folders were for some folks.
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I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm not sure I understand. Nothing has been taken away from you. You can continue to use folders with your local vaults the way you always did. I appreciate your passionate love for folders, but they certainly aren't the only way to organize data, even if that happens to be your preference. We'll keep our options open, but we don't currently have plans to add folders to the subscription service. I'm sorry this isn't the answer you were hoping for.
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@kavaa I completely agree and would love to be on the "hosted" service with all the advantages it provides (especially in a team), but I'm not ready to re-organize everything for every customer/folder.
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@kavaa: I don't think anyone is forcing you to use tags. If folders are the most important thing to you, you can use them with local vaults in the standalone version of 1Password. The good news is that if you already have a license, it won't cost you a thing to stick with the setup you prefer. It's totally up to you, of course, but personally if I'm satisfied with what I have because it meets my needs, I'm happy to stick with it and, in many cases, save time and money it would take to change to something else. And of course if something else in the future proves to be a better fit, then I'll spend the money and make the switch.
For example, I'm not buying a new iPhone this year. It's new, but it doesn't have something else that I actually need, and I still get a lot of use out of my headphone jack. Like the headphone jack, folders are conspicuously absent in the 1Password.com subscription service. But, much as Apple isn't going to come take my iPhone 6S, you can totally keep using the tools you've come to depend on: 1Password local vaults and folders. Cheers! :)
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Easier said than done. Literally. When someone else is doing the work, one can assume anything about how much time and effort it will take. I'm sure the many developers around you can tell you how often they hear "it's not that hard", and how often that proves to be true. ;)
Anyway, we're just going around in circles. It's clear that there isn't anything left to say on this subject that hasn't already been said by (mostly) you and five others in this discussion who want folders added to the subscription service, or myself and others here at AgileBits who have explained that this isn't on our roadmap.
And I think that puts things in perspective: if we spend "an hour" adding each feature that a group of a half dozen people want, that quickly adds up to a lot, and takes away from the things we could be doing to improve 1Password for greater numbers of people. I'm glad that you care about 1Password and are passionate about folders, but the answer is still "not now". :blush:
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Smart Folders would be welcome. It was one of the things Windows never had and 1Password 6 Win is still lacking. It is also missing from iOS, perhaps due to the iOS limitations.
As a compromise, perhaps 2000 folders can be split into 10 to 20 vaults of 200 to 100 folders/tags per vault. That may make things more manageable for the original poster @kavaa. I did not find anything in the discussion to indicate whether your 2000 folder are in one or multiple vaults.
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@wkleem: That's a fair point. Smart Folders are a really cool feature that's built into macOS, so it isn't something that Windows (and other platforms) can do "out of the box". That may sound silly, because of course we could just make something similar to it. And we'd very much like to. But if we do something like that, it really needs to be consistent across all platforms (web included), or it's confusing when it works differently in different places. Admittedly, we're guilty of that in a few areas already, so we're trying to make things more consistent going forward, as opposed to less. As for vaults, I tend to forget this (especially in the context of a discussion about tags and folders), but I use separate vaults to great effect. This may be part of the reason I don't miss folders. With local vaults, managing many of them is a real chore (individually syncing each...) But with 1Password Accounts, I guess I kind of use vaults the way I used folders in the past, when there was a higher barrier to using many vaults.
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Quite true: Neither of us knows if it's 10 people or 10,000. So we rely on customer feedback to gauge interest, rather than guessing. After all, if someone is happy enough to keep using 1Password without a feature they have only a mild interest in, it probably isn't super important to them — as opposed to folks like you who know exactly what they want and are super passionate about it. Cheers! :)
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We don't have any plans to remove folders from either local vault format. Those structures were decided long ago and many people have data in that form already. 1Password.com started off with a clean slate though — no legacy baggage — so that allowed for more flexibility so we can can iterate on it going forward.
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Hi @kavaa - It's great to hear back from you. Happy New Year! I can understand Folders is an important feature to you. We don't have a timeline when or if Folders will be added to our new 1Password.com accounts. Sorry for not having a better answer for you at the moment but I do appreciate the feedback. Thank you for checking in and let us know if you have any additional questions.
Have a great day!0 -
I have requested this feature before as I tried to migrate to using tags but agreeing with @kavaa it simply doesn't work for me.
Tags are great for filtering a view or for searching, but are less helpful with hierarchical organisation.
I want to share passwords with my family, so am drawn to the use of Family / Teams, however Tags doesn't allow me to organise my data in a way that I find useful.
IF I could hide all tags from the side bar, and create smart folders that where essentially saved searches for multiple tags then I may be able to work around the limitations of the flat storage model adopted in 1Password Teams/Family.
I think because 1Password for Teams/Family mirrors pretty much all the functionality of 1Password Standalone, there is that expectation that if you migrate a vault, you can migrate it, and not effectively lose or be forced into re-building/re-organising how things are structured.
When I migrated my fault I was taken a back and shocked that all of a sudden I couldn't find anything, because nothing had any tags and all my folders had gone.
Tags serve a purpose and I think I could grow to love them, but for me they are a means to find data when you know what your looking for, and help less when you don't.
I currently pay for the online version, but don't use it, and only pay for it as a means to "donate" funds to a product I would like to see developed, however as it appears that there is no indication that Folders may ever see a return I feel I might as well cancel this and stick to my standalone version, which in all honest I find sad, because you effectively have two products each with some unique features that I need in one product.
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Hi @terryrogers - Thank you so much for the constructive feedback. We appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and additional use case why folders is an important feature you would like to see within our subscription model. I will definitely make sure to let the team know and I will add this request as a +1 for folders. Have a fantastic day :-)
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Apparently, AgileBits thinks too few users want folders and are even using this forum to gauge interest? Well, using a forum is perhaps the worst way to make such a determination — it's kind of obvious to anyone who uses a computer that any file organization system without folders has rather limited effectiveness, especially as the volume of files scales up. If it helps, I'll +1 this whole thing and request that there are folders in 1Password.com accounts. We migrated to 1Password.com without realizing there wouldn't be folders ... and as our database grows, we would really benefit from some organization. But after reading this thread it sounds like folders are "not on the roadmap." They're not coming. The choice then is ours, move to a different password manager or live with an increasingly large and cluttered 1Password experience. If I may make a customer experience suggestion, Wishing us Happy New Year or Have a Fantastic Day, by the way, strikes my ears as odd and potentially sarcastic given that it is stuck on the end of boilerplate that says, thanks for writing again, but please stop — we already told you no. Better to sign off in a less chipper but professional way. But, Hey, Hope You Have the Best Day Ever! See what I mean?
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Apparently, AgileBits thinks too few users want folders and are even using this forum to gauge interest? Well, using a forum is perhaps the worst way to make such a determination —
@bradleyk: I guess that's a matter of opinion. We really love getting feedback from the 1Password community, this is one of the most direct ways of doing so, and user feedback has a very real impact on our development process — it just might not feel that way sometimes since we're not going to (and can't, and arguably shouldn't) incorporate all suggestions/requests, and then of course if your one pet feature doesn't make release then it's easy to ignore all of the others that do. :(
it's kind of obvious to anyone who uses a computer that any file organization system without folders has rather limited effectiveness, especially as the volume of files scales up.
There are millions of happy iOS users out there who might disagree. ;)
But in all seriousness it's important to remember that 1Password isn't a filesystem and therefore isn't meant to behave like one. Really this "folders versus tags" thing is a bit silly, because it's just UI. After all, there are no folders anywhere on your computer, you just think there are because of the little icons and such. Folders aren't any kind of solution when it comes to making our lives easier since you're still manually moving things around — just like you would with physical files and folders, and we're using digital devices to free us of these antiquated burdens, aren't we? I guess at least we've freed ourselves of paper cuts. :tongue:
In the end, syncing hierarchical data structures is pretty gross (especially with potentially hundreds or thousands of people accessing the same data in 1Password Teams), and the folders/tags combination has historically been a source of user confusion as well, so traditional folders probably aren't in the cards. But that's not to say that tags are the be-all-end-all. The great thing about them is that they're flexible and we could potentially do a more folder-like UI that would help some folks.
If it helps, I'll +1 this whole thing and request that there are folders in 1Password.com accounts. We migrated to 1Password.com without realizing there wouldn't be folders ... and as our database grows, we would really benefit from some organization. But after reading this thread it sounds like folders are "not on the roadmap." They're not coming. The choice then is ours, move to a different password manager or live with an increasingly large and cluttered 1Password experience. If I may make a customer experience suggestion, Wishing us Happy New Year or Have a Fantastic Day, by the way, strikes my ears as odd and potentially sarcastic given that it is stuck on the end of boilerplate that says, thanks for writing again, but please stop — we already told you no. Better to sign off in a less chipper but professional way. But, Hey, Hope You Have the Best Day Ever! See what I mean?
Thank you! I'm not sure I understand exactly where you're coming from, but I can see how you might take sincerity as sarcasm if you're irritated in the first place because 1Password.com does not have folders. I don't think we're going to prioritize "professional communication" at the expense of being chipper though. We're not corporate and really have no desire to be.
There are a few things here that I think are important takeaways: First and foremost, like anything else, if folders are critical to your workflow, then you should certainly use the tool that best suits your needs. Certainly we'd prefer that you use 1Password, but not if it's a source of pain for you. Then nobody's happy. I think it's fair to say that folders (as you think of them) probably aren't coming, but we are going to continue to improve the UI and have some big ideas for how we can make organization work better for everyone without making it more burdensome. I think long term we'll be able to satisfy many folks here who now feel like folders are The One True Solution for organization. Tags already work for most people, and they can work for even more (though old habits are hard to break), and we need to find ways of making them easier to work with and also make them useful to those who find them limiting in their current form.
But the most important takeaway is that 1Password.com does not have folders today and won't have them or something that fills a similar function (whatever form that may take) in the near term. I'm sorry that probably isn't what you want to hear, but I think it's best to be realistic. We've got a lot of other things we're working on, and folders (or a replacement) aren't a high priority right now. That said, no one here is saying "please stop". Just because we don't come back with the answer you want doesn't mean that we're saying that, or that we don't want to hear from you. On the contrary, if we don't hear from folks that want an alternative to the tag organization we have today, that might be all there ever is. We're not going to work on something that nobody cares about. So it's good to hear that this is something that you and others are passionate about, even if we're not able to say "Yes, you can have it" now.
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Thanks Brenty,
I appreciate your taking time to respond to my post.
I had intended my comment — that folders aren’t coming and it is now the customer’s choice — to wrap up what is otherwise a looping request for folders and all the defensive parrying back from AgileBits. But I have to say that your answers this time are both more informative but also worthy of one fiinal post.
Arguing as you did that discussing tags-vs-folders is “silly,” that 1PW isn’t a file system and shouldn’t be expected to behave like one, and that there really aren’t really any folders anywhere on a computer — we just think there are! — wow, that’s some fancy dancing. Each of those would be easy picking for even a high school debate team.
Tags aren’t folders and aren’t as functional. Please go to the Finder on your Mac and what do you find — a tagging system? No. That would be silly when you're looking at the few hundred thousand files on a computer. Sure there are labels (tags) available, but the primary organizational principle is hundreds and perhaps thousands of folders. Not tags. And I understand your clever argument but I don’t just imagine the folders to be there — they’re there and they work very very well. And the argument that iOS doesn’t have folders? Ah, maybe not — but apps running in iOS have folders. Do you use Evernote? Or Wunderlist? Wunderlist didn’t have folders for a long time but once they were introduced, my use of the app and the volume of entries I put into it increased 10-fold, easily. 100x may be more accurate. That’s how useful folders are.
All these AgileBits arguments that keep getting cycled into the responses for requests-for-folders are pretty much distractions from what — I suspect, anyway — is likely going on. And that is that adding folders and syncing them is a big technical challenge. And/or likely a costly one. And perhaps a security challenge, too, I don’t know. But technically it’s a challenge that AgileBits was formerly up to. No discussion of folders in 1PW should fail to remember that 1PW used to have folders and now it doesn’t.
So the actual question is why were they removed? Maybe it’s a cost issue and if so, perhaps that should be stated. If re-developing, supporting and syncing folders is prohibitively time consuming and/or expensive, say so. If that’s the case, I understand that and will accept that.
I won’t pester AgileBits further about folders again — I should have already stressed early on that I’m a fan. I’m extremely impressed with 1Password and have easily and repeatedly recommended it to business colleagues and friends. It might be my favorite app.
And yet I’ll risk boring everyone by repeating my point: once you have a few hundred logins or more than, say, 50 documents in 1PW, the user’s ability to easily organize/sort things begins to breakdown a bit — file naming become critical and cumbersome. That said, as I attempted to focus on in my earlier post: it sounds like folders are not, for whatever reason, returning. And I’ve attempted to tell other posters to make a decision — stick with 1PW or migrate to another app. For me, the decision is easy: stick with 1PW — it’s a superior password manager, probably the best one available. Yes, in my opinion it would be better with folders, but my car would be better with leather, heated seats.
Keep up the good work, Brenty and AgileBits. But tell it like it is — we can take no for an answer without all the PR dancing about how it’s better this way. For many users, it isn’t. But that’s how it goes: businesses have to make the technical, cost and security decisions that are best for the product and for their commerce.
I promise: I won’t post again about folders :)
Best,
Bradley0 -
Tags aren’t folders and aren’t as functional. Please go to the Finder on your Mac and what do you find — a tagging system? No. That would be silly when you're looking at the few hundred thousand files on a computer.
@bradleyk: You're right, but again this really comes down to context. 1Password isn't a filesystem; it's a password manager. That's an obvious statement to make, and I'm not implying that you don't know that already, only pointing out that this is a Apples and oranges comparison.
Sure there are labels (tags) available, but the primary organizational principle is hundreds and perhaps thousands of folders. Not tags. And I understand your clever argument but I don’t just imagine the folders to be there — they’re there and they work very very well.
If you look at the filesystem, it isn't hierarchical; it's a stream of 1s and 0s strewn about, in no particular order, across the surface of the disk. The structure is an abstraction of this, and is further augmented by the Finder UI, which presents the data visually as files and folders. That's what I mean. I've used alternative "file management" (for lack of a better term) apps that treat the data very differently, with searching and linking being interesting ways of presenting the same data in a manner that's suitable for humans. I actually use tags rather extensively in Finder, but admittedly the experience there has regressed a bit in recent years. But most people don't bother with any of these things and just have a "flat" filesystem on their Desktops.
And the argument that iOS doesn’t have folders? Ah, maybe not — but apps running in iOS have folders. Do you use Evernote? Or Wunderlist? Wunderlist didn’t have folders for a long time but once they were introduced, my use of the app and the volume of entries I put into it increased 10-fold, easily. 100x may be more accurate. That’s how useful folders are.
I use OmniFocus, which has a lot of similarities to both Evernote and Wunderlist. To be fair, under the hood, iOS has the same file structure that macOS does. It's literally the same (HFS+) filesystem, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future (APFS, ahoy!) So what it comes down to is that this is simply never exposed to the user in a way similar to macOS, which is what I was referring to. You're right that some apps present their own data in a traditional hierarchical structure though. For some this really is a good way to do it, and others it's just sort of a lowest-common denominator that everyone at least knows how to use.
All these AgileBits arguments that keep getting cycled into the responses for requests-for-folders are pretty much distractions from what — I suspect, anyway — is likely going on. And that is that adding folders and syncing them is a big technical challenge. And/or likely a costly one. And perhaps a security challenge, too, I don’t know. But technically it’s a challenge that AgileBits was formerly up to. No discussion of folders in 1PW should fail to remember that 1PW used to have folders and now it doesn’t.
So the actual question is why were they removed? Maybe it’s a cost issue and if so, perhaps that should be stated. If re-developing, supporting and syncing folders is prohibitively time consuming and/or expensive, say so. If that’s the case, I understand that and will accept that.That's a great question! Folders weren't removed; rather, we made a conscious decision not to build them into 1Password.com from the beginning. It doesn't come down to cost, but rather the complexity of syncing hierarchical data across multiple users (who will not all be online at the same time), which I mentioned (but only in passing) in my previous post. We're definitely up to technical challenges, but there are plenty more available to us so we can prioritize based on feasibility and the overall impact on users. Right now, that means a focus on reliability. I don't know what you were using before, but with every other sync service I've used conflicts were a big headache. This just isn't the case with 1Password.com, in spite of scaling to tens, hundreds, and thousands of users sharing the same vaults. We haven't eliminated this problem entirely as there are edge cases, but for many users the difference is night and day.
Certainly adding support for folders would be time consuming and cost money, but the real problem is what happens to an item that lives in Folder A, and then you have two users that move it while offline? User 1 Moves it from Folder A to Folder B, then user 2 moves it from Folder A to Folder C; finally, User 1 moves it again to Folder D. Who "wins"? If you just go by "last change", the answer is that it ends up in Folder D (from User 1). But we also have to consider that, at the point where User 1 moved it from Folder B to Folder D, according to User 2, it wasn't even in Folder B, so how could it be moved from there to Folder D? This is compounded when you have more than just two users making changes to a vault. If we switch folders for tags here, the problem goes away entirely, because tags are not mutually exclusive. This is an overly simplified example, but hopefully it at least helps illustrate the problem.
I won’t pester AgileBits further about folders again — I should have already stressed early on that I’m a fan. I’m extremely impressed with 1Password and have easily and repeatedly recommended it to business colleagues and friends. It might be my favorite app.
Thank you! Not for saying you won't "pester us" — we don't want that — but for your passion about 1Password. It really shows, since I'm sure you could find other uses for your time besides offering us your feedback (and reading my long-winded responses). Please don't stop. It's difficult to pull off in text over the internet, but I hope my responses show a bit of playfulness (hence the "dancing"), which is my attempt to keep what could be a bit contentious fun, since there's a good conversation to be had about this, even if we disagree. If anything I've said has given you the opposite impression, please accept my apology and try to ignore it. :(
And yet I’ll risk boring everyone by repeating my point: once you have a few hundred logins or more than, say, 50 documents in 1PW, the user’s ability to easily organize/sort things begins to breakdown a bit — file naming become critical and cumbersome. That said, as I attempted to focus on in my earlier post: it sounds like folders are not, for whatever reason, returning. And I’ve attempted to tell other posters to make a decision — stick with 1PW or migrate to another app. For me, the decision is easy: stick with 1PW — it’s a superior password manager, probably the best one available. Yes, in my opinion it would be better with folders, but my car would be better with leather, heated seats.
I think you're 90% right, in that 1Password needs better organizational capabilities to make your life (and ours) easier. We really disagree that folders in the traditional sense are the solution, but we're very much looking into other options which could fill this need for users. It probably still sounds like a bad "folders are a technical problem, therefore they are not good for organization", but on the contrary, all of this is about user experience, so offering an organizational feature that makes the sync experience (which is fundamental to the service, to put it mildly) worse is bad for everybody. I think we can do some things with the UI that will satisfy your needs without introducing problems and additional complexity.
Keep up the good work, Brenty and AgileBits. But tell it like it is — we can take no for an answer without all the PR dancing about how it’s better this way. For many users, it isn’t. But that’s how it goes: businesses have to make the technical, cost and security decisions that are best for the product and for their commerce.
Thank you! I really couldn't have said it better myself, so I appreciate you summing things up so succinctly. In case there is any doubt, we don't have plans for folders in 1Password.com, but the feedback here is instrumental as we work on making it better at organizing large amounts of data. This is something that will only become more important with time, so we're not ignoring it.
I promise: I won’t post again about folders :)
If not, I sincerely hope you'll share your thoughts on other areas where there's room for improvement, Bradley. 1Password will be better for it. I promise. :chuffed:
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Thanks Brently,
I do have one followup to your well-present overview. You wrote:
Certainly adding support for folders would be time consuming and cost money, but the real problem is what happens to an item that lives in Folder A, and then you have two users that move it while offline? User 1 Moves it from Folder A to Folder B, then user 2 moves it from Folder A to Folder C; finally, User 1 moves it again to Folder D. Who "wins"? If you just go by "last change", the answer is that it ends up in Folder D (from User 1). But we also have to consider that, at the point where User 1 moved it from Folder B to Folder D, according to User 2, it wasn't even in Folder B, so how could it be moved from there to Folder D? This is compounded when you have more than just two users making changes to a vault. If we switch folders for tags here, the problem goes away entirely, because tags are not mutually exclusive. This is an overly simplified example, but hopefully it at least helps illustrate the problem.
Having worked in collaborative video edits (multiple editors, one vault of source footage), I would say that what the user(s) do in their workflow is their problem, not AgileBits'. For our business or for our project, we can design and use any folder system that works for us. And each team member has to work in a manner that respects the workflow. The challenge for AgileBits is to keep things synced promptly and accurately. If we on the users-end are moving files around from folder to folder that's our business. (See Wunderlist, for example.) If files might be moved as part of the workflow, then tags would be very useful as breadcrumbs to track them down. But in a collaborative work situation, users would know where the file would have been moved, and why.
I apologize for eating up so much of your time, Brently ... I'm impressed with your responsiveness and detail.
Now lets all let AgileBits get back to work on a great product.
Best,
Brad0 -
I think it depends on your audience. Tags work ok with programmers, but if you're supporting administrative users or people with similar skill levels and training (aka "short-timers"), the folder paradigm is a lot easier to understand as they already have a conceptual model of how it works and you don't have to teach them how to use the tool and a whole different mental model at the same time. If you're dealing with people who have difficulty if an icon moves or looks different, tags are a non-starter.
If you change out the word "folder": for "group", does that help? I think the idea of presenting a "group" of related objects together could be supported for sync on multiple platforms, and get the same effect as a folder, especially if the UI generated the tags for grouping entries automagically. Let people expand/close the group as needed, and you have the best of both worlds.
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This comes to mind.... https://xkcd.com/1172/
(I hope this is taken as intended...as a light and wry comment, not as criticism of anyone...if we've used computers for any length of time – and I'm at year 47! – we've all felt this way with a favorite piece of software)
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Hi!
Still nothing planned I guess ?
Thanks.0
