Pinata has always been a collaboration tool. Developers working on NFT collections with artists. Agencies working with clients. Decentralized Finance protocols sharing order books with users. DAO documenting proposals and votes. The list goes on, but the fact is and has always been that Pinata is used by teams of various shapes and sizes. Even when a single person uses Pinata, the files they work with are often representative of external collaboration or need some sort of organization method.

Earlier this year, we introduced Workspaces to make it easy for teams to collaborate, but there was still a missing ingredient. We needed to give everyone a way to organize their files. Today, that problem is solved.

Introducing Groups

With Groups, you can now organize your files via the Pinata API or the web app. For developers using the API, this creates a new primitive that can enhance your app development experience. In the past, you may have used some combination of JSON files or Pinata Metadata to organize app-related files and to fetch those files for your app. Now, you can simply create a Group and store all of your app’s IPFS content in that Group. Fetching a list of content for a Group is incredibly fast and simple.

If you’re using the web app, it couldn’t be simpler. You have three ways to add files to a Group:

1. From the context menu of a file, you can add a single file to a Group
2. From the Groups page, you can add new files to a Group
3. From the files page, you can use our bulk select tool and use the add to Group bulk action

When you visit the Groups page, you can see all of the files just for that Group. This makes organizing projects, whether they be NFT collections, student assignments, research papers, or anything else simple.

Groups or Folders

Groups look and feel like folders, but they are distinctly different because IPFS natively supports folders. As you may have experienced in the past, if you upload a folder from your file system to Pinata, the entire folder is pinned to IPFS. When you access that folder, all of the files in the folder (which are also pinned) are accessible.

With Groups, you can organize content without requiring individual files to live in an immutable folder. In fact, you can organize folders of files inside Groups. Conveniently, the mutability of Groups means you can move files and folders between Groups.

Organization and Collaboration

Combined with the power of Workspaces, Groups gives you a whole new way to stay organized. We have many customers with millions of files pinned through their accounts. Staying organized when you have that many files is difficult. Groups solves this.

If you’re working on a team, you can switch into your team’s Workspace and help collaborate on Groups starting today. Groups created and updated in the web app are available via the API, so whether you’re technical or more visual, everything stays in sync.

Start using Groups today and organize your files. Happy Pinning!