Organising files with folders

Folders keep a Library tidy once it holds more than a handful of files. The most important thing to know about them is what they don’t do: a folder never appears in a file’s public URL. You can reorganise a Library however you like without breaking a single link on your published site.

The short version

Create, move and delete folders in the dashboard. The Designer panel browses folders but doesn’t manage them.
Moving a file between folders never changes its link. Renaming its slug does — see Version history and replacing files.
A folder must be empty before you can delete it.

Where folders live

Folders are managed on the Files page of a Library in the DocBeam dashboard.

The Designer panel is deliberately read-only here: it shows your folders, lets you click into them, and gives you breadcrumbs to get back out — but there is no create, rename or delete. Uploads from the panel land in whichever folder you’re currently viewing.

Creating a folder

Open the Library’s Files page in the dashboard.
Click New folder.
Give it a name and click Create.

The folder is created inside whichever folder you’re currently viewing, so if you want a top-level folder, make sure you’re at the root of the Library first.

Folder names can be anything from 1 to 255 characters, and are trimmed of surrounding whitespace. There’s no restriction on which characters you can use.

Two folders in the same place can share a name. DocBeam won’t stop you, and nothing breaks — but you’ll have a harder time telling them apart, so it’s worth avoiding.

There’s no limit on how deeply you can nest folders.

Moving files

Three ways, all in the dashboard:

Drag a file onto a folder row. To move a file back to the root of the Library, drag it onto the Library’s crumb in the breadcrumb trail.
Use the row menu. Click ⋯ on a file, then Move to….
Move several at once. Select multiple files with the checkboxes, then use Move to… in the bulk action bar.

Folders themselves can’t be dragged or bulk-selected — only files move.

Bulk actions

With files selected, the bulk bar offers Move to…, Download, Delete and Clear.

One thing worth setting expectations on: bulk download fetches your files one at a time in the browser. It isn’t a server-generated zip, so downloading fifty files means fifty downloads landing in your downloads folder.

Navigating

Click a folder row to open it. The breadcrumb trail reads Libraries › Your Library › folder › …, and each crumb is clickable.

The folder path is part of the dashboard URL, so a folder view is a linkable page. You can bookmark a deeply nested folder, or send a colleague a link that opens exactly where you are.

Deleting a folder

Hover over a folder row and click the trash button.

A folder has to be empty first — that means no files and no sub-folders. If anything is left inside, DocBeam refuses and tells you:

This folder isn’t empty. Move or delete its contents first.

Move or delete the contents, then try again.

There is no folder rename

DocBeam can’t rename a folder today. If you need a different name, create a new folder and move the contents across, then delete the old one.

Folders and your public links

This is the part worth reading twice.

A file’s public URL is built from the Library and the file’s slug — never from its folder:

https://files.docbeam.io/<your-site>/<file-slug>

There’s no folder segment in there, and DocBeam’s CDN looks a file up by site and slug alone. It never consults the folder tree.

The consequences are all good ones:

Moving a file between folders cannot break a published link. Reorganise freely.
Deleting a folder (once you’ve moved its contents elsewhere) doesn’t affect any link either.
Renaming a file’s slug is the thing that changes its URL, and that has no redirect — the old link stops working. See Version history and replacing files for the difference between a display name and a slug.

Why same-named files conflict across folders

Because slugs are unique per Library, not per folder, two files can’t share a slug even if they sit in completely different folders.

So if you upload report.pdf into 2026/Q1 when a report.pdf already exists in Archive, you’ll still get the conflict prompt asking whether to replace it or keep both. That’s expected — the URL space is flat even though the folder tree isn’t.