OpenArt Projects & Folders: Organize Your AI Workspace

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Why an unorganized OpenArt dashboard slows you down

If you generate a lot, you already know the feeling: fifty images from three different shoots, some of them run through the AI Product Image Generator for a client, some just quick personal tests, all sitting in one feed, and you can't remember which version you liked. A creator on Adobe's own community forums put it plainly when asking for folder support in a generation history: without one, finding a specific image from months back means scrolling through everything you've ever made. The same problem shows up in OpenArt if you never sort anything.

The fix isn't a single button. It's three layers working together: projects that scope your workspace, folders that hold assets by location, and labels that tag them by status or theme. Once you know which layer does what, filing something away takes seconds instead of a scroll session.

Set up scoped workspaces with the project switcher

The project switcher sits pinned to the top left of your workspace. Open it and you'll see your personal space plus every other project you've created, each with a quick rename or delete option next to it.

Create a new project for whatever you're working on right now, a client, a series, a one-off campaign, and give it a name. The moment you switch into it, think of it as starting a fresh session: your generation feed clears, and everything you make from that point on stays scoped to that project. Nothing from your personal space or other projects shows up while you're inside it.

This is also where the move-vs-copy distinction starts to matter, even before you touch a folder. If you generate something inside Project A and later decide it belongs in Project B, you don't retype the prompt or start over. You move or copy the asset across projects instead, which is covered in full a couple of sections down. For now, the thing to remember is simpler: a project is a container for your work, and what you create stays in the container you're standing in unless you deliberately take it somewhere else.

If you're a serial creator, this scoping matters more than it looks. Someone building a multi-episode drama with OpenArt Director across several weeks benefits from keeping each series in its own project from day one, rather than untangling episode 1 from episode 12 after the fact.

Sort new generations with Unsorted, Folders, and Labels tabs

Right above your generation area, inside any project, you'll see three tabs: Unsorted, Folders, and Labels. Together they're where everything you create in that project gets organized.

Anything you generate at the project level, without picking a folder first, lands in Unsorted. Nothing is lost. It just sits there until you're ready to file it away, which means you can generate freely first and organize later without worrying about losing track of a piece.

Folders live right next to Unsorted. Create one for a shoot, a client, a theme, whatever grouping makes sense for how you actually work, the same way you might build a mood board for a single campaign before you start generating. A folder is a blank workspace in its own right: click into it and you can generate directly inside that folder instead of sorting things afterward. If you already know an asset belongs to "Holiday Campaign" before you've even generated it, save yourself the extra step and generate it there.

For everything already sitting in Unsorted, selection works the way you'd expect from a file manager: Shift-click to grab a range, Control-click (Cmd-click on Mac) to hand-pick specific pieces, then use "Add to Folder" to file them away. If you haven't created the folder yet, that same menu lets you create one on the spot, so you're never stuck switching screens mid-sort.

In practice, most people land somewhere in between the two extremes. You generate a batch without stopping to pick a folder because you're still exploring options, then once you can see which three or four actually worked, you select just those and file them. Unsorted is what makes that order possible: it holds the rejects and the keepers together until you've decided which is which, instead of forcing you to commit to a folder before you've even seen the output.

Move or copy assets between folders and projects

Once assets are sitting in a folder, you have two more moves available: shifting them to a different folder in the same project, or sending them to a different project entirely.

Select what you want using the same Shift-click and Control-click pattern from the previous section, then choose "Move to Project" and pick the destination. From there you get two options, and the difference between them matters:

• Move pulls the files out of the current project completely. They stop existing in the old location.
• Copy leaves the originals exactly where they are and creates duplicates in the new project.

Use move when something genuinely belongs somewhere else now, a finished piece that's graduated from a draft project into the client's dedicated project, for example. Use copy when you want the same asset to live in two places at once, like a hero shot you want visible in both a client project and your own portfolio project, without breaking the link to where it came from.

If you're running an agency with three or four active clients, this is the distinction that keeps their work from getting mixed up. A shared visual style you build once, say, a locked-down AI Brand Kit for a client, can be copied into that client's project as a starting point for every new shoot, while the client's actual finished deliverables should be moved, not copied, once they're approved, so there's exactly one version of the truth and no old draft lingering in a project you're not actively billing for.

The same logic applies within a single project when you're filing something into a folder for the first time: adding an asset to a folder doesn't remove it from Unsorted's history, but moving or copying between folders and projects is a deliberate, one-way-or-two-copies choice, so it's worth pausing on which one you actually need before you click through.

Folders vs. labels: choosing the right tool

By now you've used folders enough to know they behave like containers. Labels work differently, and the difference is the one thing worth locking in before you build out your own system.

A folder called "Holiday Campaign" holds everything shot for that one campaign. A label called "Final" can pull in the finished pieces from that folder and the finished pieces sitting in five other folders at the same time, because it's grouping by status, not by where the file happens to live.

The decision rule is short: use a folder to answer "where does this live." Use a label to answer "what state or theme is this in." If you catch yourself creating a folder named "Approved" or "Needs Revision," that's usually a label wearing a folder's clothes, since status changes constantly but a file's home doesn't need to.

Why splitting location from status isn't an OpenArt quirk

Photo and video software ran into this same problem long before AI generation existed, and landed on the same split. In Adobe Lightroom, a folder is where the file physically sits on disk, one folder per photo, while a Collection is a virtual grouping that can pull images from any number of folders at once. As one widely cited breakdown of the system puts it, a single photo can be added to as many Collections as you want, and there will still only be one original file, because a Collection just references the photo rather than duplicating it.

OpenArt's labels play a similar role, cutting across wherever the files actually live, though the mechanics aren't identical: a Lightroom Collection is a reference, so adding a photo to five Collections never creates five files, while sending an OpenArt asset somewhere new is an explicit choice between Move and Copy, and Copy is the one that leaves you with an actual duplicate. The underlying principle carries over regardless: once you separate "where this lives" from "what this is," you stop rebuilding your organization every time a project's status changes, which is the same reason professional photo libraries have kept the two systems separate for over a decade.

How this compares to Midjourney and Leonardo.Ai

Midjourney's folders work close to what's described above: create one, drag or bulk-add images into it, and it functions like a folder on your computer. Leonardo.Ai's Collections go a step further with nesting, letting you build sub-collections inside a parent one, though free accounts are capped at a single collection.

Neither publishes a separate tagging layer that sits on top of their folders the way OpenArt's labels do. That's the practical difference: in Midjourney or Leonardo, "location" and "status" both have to be expressed through the same folder structure, which means a single finished asset either sits in one place or gets duplicated across several. In OpenArt, location and status are two separate questions, so you don't have to choose.

Build your own organization system

You don't need to design the perfect structure on day one. Start with one project for what you're actually working on this week, a couple of folders for the obvious groupings (a client, a shoot), and two or three labels for status ("Draft," "Final") or theme. Add more of each only when the current set stops being enough to find what you need.

The three layers exist so your setup can grow with your workload instead of getting rebuilt every time it does. Once you're generating inside folders by default and tagging as you finish pieces, sorting stops being a separate chore.

If you're setting this up around a multi-episode project, it's worth pairing this with how to use OpenArt Director, since the two problems (organizing what you've already made, and directing what comes next) tend to show up together.

FAQs

Can labels move between projects the way folders can?

No. Labels can only be renamed or deleted, they don't travel between projects the way folders do.

What happens to assets in Unsorted if I never sort them?

Nothing gets deleted. They stay in Unsorted indefinitely. The tradeoff is findability, not safety: the longer Unsorted grows, the more it turns into the same messy feed this whole system is meant to fix, so it's worth clearing it out in short passes rather than letting months pile up.

Can I move a whole folder to another project, not just the assets inside it?

Yes. A folder can be renamed or moved to another project as a unit, the same way individual assets can be moved or copied across projects.

Do I have to create a folder before I can generate into it?

No. You can create the folder first and generate directly inside it, or skip that and generate at the project level, which lands the result in Unsorted, then file it into a folder afterward with Add to Folder. Both paths land in the same place.

Does adding a label move an asset out of its folder?

No. Labels are tags, not containers, so applying one doesn't change which folder the asset lives in. A finished piece can stay right where it is and still get pulled into a label like "Final" alongside finished pieces sitting in other folders.