Improve Files search

Status: Archived Submitted by on ‎03-10-2020 01:06 PM
(8)

The Files search function results should include information about where in Files a particular file is located.

I'm editing a page and want to include a book icon image that I know is somewhere in my files. I have two choices

  1. I either have to manually open and scan thru each folder looking for "b&w book icon.png" (Is it in the Images folder or some other subfolder? Is it in the Assets folder or some subfolder there? Do I even remember/know the name of the file?) or
  2. leave the editing and go to Files to use the search tool. Even then, the search results don't tell where in Files a particular file is located. Again, it will find "b&w book icon.png" but it doesn't tell me if it is in Images/icons or Assets/Navigation or whatever.

In case 1 it would be very helpful to have a search function in the editor view.

In case 2 having location information in the search results would be better than nothing. Then I could go back to the page editor and at least know which folder to go into.

Labels
3 Comments
t_furnell
Community Explorer
‎10-01-2020 10:09 AM

I think both of these would be highly valuable. I found this idea as I'm just looking for particular files, not editing page. For instance:

One of the course contributors has uploaded duplicate or updated version of a file to the root directory. I do a search, and see that a second file with the same name exists. But I don't know where this original file is situated (we have a substantial course), so I'll have to go through all of the folders before I can find out where it is, so that I can move this new file to the prior location. I also can't tell which file is where, so I might accidentally do something with (e.g. delete) one file when I meant to do it with the other.

t_furnell_1-1601568321731.png

A location column, or even the option to display a popup of the location, would give me the information I need. Funnily enough, using the ellipsis menu I can move either file wherever I want to from the search results but I don't even know where they currently reside...

kathleen1
Community Participant
‎06-08-2022 03:10 PM

We definitely need this. We will be editing and replacing a huge number of files, and it's going to be incredibly time consuming to click through all of the subfolders to locate where to upload them to.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
‎04-13-2023 04:35 PM
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.