Shopify merchants are frustrated by the platform’s lack of file organization capabilities, particularly for managing large image libraries. Users cannot create folders or effectively categorize uploaded files in the admin panel.
Current Limitations:
The ‘views’ feature in the files section doesn’t allow adding files to custom categories
No native folder structure exists for organizing thousands of product and general images
This creates significant time waste when searching for specific files
Suggested Workarounds:
Image Manager app: Offers sorting, filtering, bulk uploads, and drag-and-drop functionality (though not designed purely for organization)
CSV export method: Export products to spreadsheets to view image URLs and manually sort
Naming conventions: Systematically name files to include page/product identifiers
Community Response:
Multiple users cite this as a deal-breaker, preventing migration from other platforms
Merchants with larger inventories find the limitation particularly problematic
Frustration persists from early discussions through mid-2024, with no native solution implemented
Even Shopify’s AI chat provides inconsistent guidance (suggesting impossible tagging features)
Shopify support acknowledged the feedback would be passed to development teams, but the core functionality remains absent despite ongoing platform updates.
Summarized with AI on October 23.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
@Sambelina I noted this elsewhere in this thread but it’s not immediately visible given the number of comments.
I developed Simple File Manager for precisely this purpose. You can immediately begin organizing your files with directories and even upload your existing directory structure. Your file names are also updated based on the directories they’re in so that you can easily look them up in the Shopify Products page.
Here are a couple of tutorials I’ve written to help you get the most out of the app:
Shopify needs a media manager . It is so weird that there isn’t any. This is a very basic feature. Unless you have only a few media files you can get very disorganized quickly. Folders and subfolders and Tagging of files is urgently needed
Thanks for your explanation, but I strongly disagree. The views is just a bad half-baked solution to find files specially if you have thousands of them. Search for tags would be a much better one and organize them in folders with automatic rules. All the files organization of Shopify in the files section is very primitive and something they should be working on for version 3. Right now it is really bad.
I know Sopify is not going to want to hear this, but I have a big project ahead of me and, after researching the available apps, I think I’m going to get a free DropBox account to upload my files. Then I can just link to them (they’re PDFs so they will open in a new window), and manage them in DropBox. The images are fine in Shopify for me, it’s the documents that go with the products that I would do this for.
It’s 2025, and while we were excited about Shopify’s e-commerce focus, we’re surprised to find that there’s still no built-in way to organize assets. The only option seems to be paying for yet another monthly subscription just to manage files efficiently.
We’re already looking at multiple paid add-ons, and now we need to add another one for something as basic as file management? We recently migrated from WIX, but at this point, we’re questioning if it’s even worth it—WIX offers a native file manager by default.
Is there a plan to introduce this functionality, or is the expectation that users continue relying on third-party solutions?