Best way to "flatten" a deeply nested folder structured document library?

Question

_{Wednesday, October 31, 2012 7:03 PM}

I have a document library with thousands of documents, but the users went with a very ugly and deeply nested folder structure.  Now they would like to flatten these documents and apply tags instead.  Are there any easy options here for automatically flattening all of the documents to a single level, or will we need to recursively follow the folder structure and copy everything out into a new document library?

All replies (1)

_{Wednesday, October 31, 2012 7:09 PM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

You could just ignore the folders. Edit your views and in the Folders section select "Show all items without folders".

Folders will still be displayed with uploading files and when using Windows Explorer View.

Whether or not you move the files, someone will need to edit the properties of each document to add the meta data. Once the meta data has been added you can then create views to group and filter on the meta data.

To "flatten" the folder structure you could write a PowerShell script to "move" the files.

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