The Folio Interface — Sidebar, Toolbar, and Navigation

Once connected to SmugMug, Folio presents a clean interface designed for photographers. This guide covers the main areas of the app — the sidebar, toolbar, home screen, menu bar extra, activity log, and breadcrumb navigation.

Sidebar

The left panel shows your SmugMug account structure as a collapsible folder and gallery tree.

• Your profile — your username and photo appear at the top. Click it to return to the home screen.
• Search — a search field below your profile lets you search your entire account.
• Folders — displayed with a folder icon. Click the disclosure triangle to expand and reveal subfolders or galleries.
• Galleries — displayed with a photo icon and an image count badge. Click a gallery to view its contents.
• Connection status — a colored dot at the bottom of the sidebar indicates your connection state: green means connected, amber means authenticating, and gray means disconnected.
• Trial banner — if you are on a free trial, the sidebar shows your remaining days along with a link to purchase a license.

Sidebar Controls

The toolbar includes three controls for managing the sidebar:

• Expand All — opens every folder in the tree
• Collapse All — closes all folders and scrolls back to the top
• Refresh — reloads the folder tree from SmugMug

Home Screen

When no gallery is selected, the main area displays the Popular Media Wall — a mosaic of your most popular photos across SmugMug. Click any photo to jump directly to its gallery.

You can toggle this feature in Settings under General > Show popular photos on home screen.

Toolbar

The toolbar changes dynamically based on what you have selected.

During active operations such as downloads or uploads, additional Pause, Resume, and Stop controls appear in the toolbar.

Menu Bar Extra

Folio places a small icon in the macOS menu bar (next to the clock area). The icon changes to reflect what the app is doing:

• Camera aperture — Folio is idle
• Up arrow — an upload is in progress
• Down arrow — a download is in progress

Click the icon to open a quick-access panel that shows:

• Your connection status
• Upload and download progress
• Pause, Resume, and Stop controls for active operations
• Quick links to open Folio, start a backup, configure auto-upload, or open migration

Activity Log

The bottom of the Folio window contains a collapsible drawer with two tabs: Activity Log and Report.

Activity Log Tab

The Activity Log tab displays a real-time, scrolling log of operations as they happen — downloads, uploads, backups, and migrations. Each entry is timestamped so you can follow the progress of long-running tasks.

Report Tab

When an operation completes, the Report tab shows a summary with a three-tier status indicator:

• Success (green) — everything completed without issues
• Partial (amber) — the operation finished but some items were skipped or encountered non-critical errors
• Failure (red) — the operation could not complete due to a critical error

Click any report entry to expand it and see a file-by-file breakdown.

Auto-Open Behavior

Reports auto-open the Activity Log drawer when issues are detected during an operation. If everything succeeds, the drawer stays in its current state (open or closed).

Disk Persistence

Activity logs are saved to disk as daily log files at:

~/Documents/Folio/logs/smugmug_YYYY-MM-DD.log

These files are plain text and can be opened in any text editor. They are useful for troubleshooting issues or providing context when contacting support.

Breadcrumb Navigation

When viewing a folder or gallery, a breadcrumb trail appears at the top of the main area (for example, Home > Landscapes > Mountains > Summit Gallery). Click any segment to navigate directly to that level.

A link icon next to the breadcrumb copies the SmugMug web URL for the current folder or gallery to your clipboard — useful for quickly sharing a link.