Arranging your folders

Sirv provides an easy way to share and serve your files, so you'll probably use it increasingly more over time. Thinking of a logical folder structure from the beginning will help keep your files organized into the future.

Plan ahead, with folders

Folders and sub-folders are the best way to organize your files, helping you easily navigate and share your images, videos, PDFs and any other files.

At the very top level, aim to have a relatively low number of files and folders. You can do this with very broad groups, for example if you're hosting product images on Sirv, you could create a top level folder called products, rather than storing each product or categories of products in the root of your account.

If you're hosting 360 spins on Sirv, be sure to store each set of spin images in its own folder, to avoid confusion or endless scrolling through thousands of images in a single folder.

Aim for under 1,000 files per folder

There is no limit to the number of files and sub-folders but we recommend aiming for fewer than 1,000 files/folders in a single folder. This will help ensure that folder contents load very quickly when you're browsing your Sirv account at my.sirv.com or by FTP.

If the contents of a single folder are likely to grow beyond 1,000 files/folders, make a plan to split the content into subfolders. One method is to name sub-folders with the first one, two or three characters from the file/folder name.

Keep below 25,000 items per folder

If the contents of a single folder grows beyond 25,000 files or folders, the folder contents won't be shown in my.sirv.com. The files will still be searchable and will be processed and served as normal but you will lose the convenience of browsing.

Keep well below 25,000 items per folder by creating sub-folders.

For example, if you have 40,000 folders with each folder named by a product SKU, the instead of this folder name...

/products/8282579/image-here-01.jpg

... create a set of folders with the first 2 characters from the SKU:

/products/82/8282579/image-here-01.jpg

If you have 60,000 images without a folder structure, you could create folders with the first 3 characters of the filename. For example, from:

/images/puma-shoe-174925.jpg

to:

/images/pum/puma-shoe-174925.jpg

Use predictable names

Name your folders and files according to a predictable naming convention. Human readable folder paths will help you navigate folders in my.sirv.com and will also contribute towards good image SEO.

If you're hosting images for an ecommerce site, a logical folder structure would be one folder per category, with subfolders for each product. The category names would match your website, as would the product names or SKUs. That'll permit you to automatically serve the right images for the right product, particularly if you use a Sirv smart gallery and/or its thumbnail capability.

One folder per spin

If you're hosting 360 spins on Sirv, we recommend using one folder for each spin.

Folders could be stored in the root, like this:

• /vibram-bikila-evo/
• /vibram-v-classic/
• /vibram-kmdsport/

But better to arrange store them in a subfolder, such as this:

• /products/vibram-bikila-evo/
• /products/vibram-v-classic/
• /products/vibram-kmdsport/

Or with product categories:

• /products/vibram/bikila-evo/
• /products/vibram/v-classic/
• /products/nike/air-max-90/
• /products/nike/air-huarache/

Or into a folder for all your spins:

• /spins/vibram-bikila-evo/
• /spins/vibram-v-classic/
• /spins/vibram-kmdsport/

Or any other structure that makes sense for your business.

File name considerations

Sirv is case sensitive, so these two folders are unique, not the same:

• /vibram-classic/
• /Vibram-Classic/

You can use spaces in filenames - they will automatically be encoded as '%20'. However, to minimize the possibility of human error when coding, we recommend using hyphens '-' or underscores '_' instead of spaces.

If you move files or change their names, keep in mind that the original URLs pointing to those files will no longer work. If your website references old URLs, you'll need to update your site to point to the new file location.