Hi everyone! I’m very excited to be here to talk about becoming more organized when you’re working in Canva… it is my favourite Canva related topic and I hope that by the end of the session today, that you’re feeling a little more excited about getting organized.

You’re likely watching this training because you’re struggling to some degree with the level of organization in your own Canva account.

Or you might feel reasonably organized but you’re always looking for ways to tidy things up a bit more.

You Need a System

The reality is that if you don’t create some sort of organizational structure using folders inside of Canva that you can easily maintain, what will very quickly happen is that you’re going to start creating designs and while at first it will feel manageable to simply scroll until you find the design you’re looking for,  you will inevitably reach a point where you have so many designs that scrolling and searching becomes too cumbersome.

You won’t be able to quickly find what you’re looking for, you’re going to feel a lot more overwhelmed, and you’re going to waste a lot of your time.

Now if you’re new to Canva, it’s the perfect time to set up your system before you get to the point of feeling overwhelmed by all of your designs and images.

And if you’re already a veteran user of Canva, you may be feeling like it’s already out of control but I promise that you can still create a system and get things back on track. It is never too late.

Why Organization is Important

Before we get started looking at the how to’s of getting organized in Canva, it’s important to address that I’m making an assumption that you WANT to get more organized and you already see the benefits.

But for those among you who may be on the fence and who may be wondering why you should care about getting organized, let’s first take a quick look at some of the reasons that putting the time and effort into creating an organizational system in Canva, or hiring someone to do it for you, why it’s worthwhile.

So what are the benefits of getting organized in Canva.

Well, you’re going to save a lot of time and stress.

Yes, you’re going to have to invest some time up front to do the organization, but ultimately, you are going to SAVE a lot of time in the future, and that’s going to lead to a variety of benefits…

You’ll see increased productivity… and faster turnaround times

And I think this one is probably pretty obvious, because clearly if you no longer have to spend a bunch of time searching for the designs, images and templates that you need inside of Canva, you’re going to have more time to actually dedicate to creating the content that you need inside of Canva.

So overall, you end up spending less time in Canva and that’s going to leave you with more time to focus on the tasks and projects that actually move the needle in your business, like sales, and marketing, and supporting your existing clients.

Also, if you’re a graphic designer or social media manager or template designer, or anybody else whose business *is* the work you create inside of Canva, you’ll also be able to reduce the time that it takes to produce design content.

And you’re also absolutely going to reduce your stress & frustration

I think most business owners have been in a situation where they KNOW they created something in the past that they’d really like to re-use as a starting point.

Maybe it’s a presentation, or an Instagram design, or a lead magnet… whatever it is, you may recall that you created something a month or 3 months or 6 months ago that you’d like to re-use so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Without an organizational system, you’re going to find yourself scrolling to find that design and inevitably the frustration is going to settle in.

With an organized Canva filing cabinet, you’re going to spend a LOT less effort  searching for specific designs or images which in turn is absolutely going to reduce any friction or frustration you’re feeling while working in Canva.

Your organization is also going to result in a more efficient team.

When you have a team that needs to access the content in your Canva account, a hot mess filing disaster is NOT going to lead to great team efficiency. But if you have a well organized Canva account, your team members are going to be able to find what they need faster, so they can complete projects in less time.

And then finally, an organization system is going to provide you with a more clear focus.

Having an organized Canva account is going to to eliminate the distractions and clutter that come with a disorganized workspace.

When you know where everything is in your Canva account, you’re not going to waste precious mental energy searching for the assets you need or getting sidetracked by irrelevant designs.

Instead, you can focus your attention on the task at hand, you know that everything you need is right where it should be.

So I think you get the point and that point is that ultimately, there IS a cost to Canva disorganization, and when you know how to create an organized system, and when you carve a bit of time out to implement that system, you are going to be able to create your Canva content much faster and with a lot less frustration.

What Canva Plan Do You Need?

So let’s talk get into the How-To’s, and an FYI that most of the features I’m going to talk about today are available on both the free Canva plan as well as the Canva Pro subscription.

At one point, you could only create two custom folders on a free Canva plan, whereas you could create unlimited folders on Canva Pro, but Canva removed that limitation quite some time ago and now you can create unlimited folders on both the free and Pro plans.

That said, there are three specific differences that I’ll address, but for the most part, you will be able to apply the features and steps we talk about today, regardless of which plan you’re on.

Don’t Rely on Canva’s Homepage

The first thing I want to highlight is that for effective organization inside of Canva …you should not be working from Canva’s home screen.

Anytime I do a Canva training and talk about organization, there is always a question related to how to organize the home screen so it feels less overwhelming.

And the answer is that you currently can’t impose any organization or re-ordering of the content on Canva’s home screen, which is why I want you to get used to coming down here to the Projects section of Canva.

You will have complete control over creating folders and batch organizing designs and images within the Projects section of your Canva account, but you don’t have the same capability on your Canva homepage.

Instead, the home screen is simply going to list ALL of the designs you’ve worked in, with the most recently edited designs at the top.

Organizing Your Canva Uploads

You can also create folders to organize all of your images into categories to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

For example, you could have a styled stock photo folder that is broken down by source website, and then further broken down into subfolders by subject matter or by colour palette.

Whatever works for you to browse to intuitively browse and find a specific image in the future.

A lot of people don’t realize that you do not have to store all of your images in the Uploads folder, and to be honest, I would strongly advise against doing that because it just becomes a bottomless pit of images that makes it practically impossible to find what you’re looking for over time.

Now I know many of you have chaotic Uploads folders and image organization is an enormous, overwhelming challenge for a lot of Canva users.

In fact, you have probably found yourself re-uploading the same image multiple times because you can’t find it. You’re going to be able to avoid that in the future if you have a clear organizational system for your images as well as your designs.

Start to get into the habit of treating your Uploads folder like a temporary holding spot. Think of it like the in-tray on a physical office desk, and just like that in-tray,  you don’t want to treat Uploads like a long term storage solution.

Once you’re done with an image, move it into a more permanent folder, archive it, or delete it if you don’t require it in the future.

And also try to get into the habit of uploading your images directly into the desired custom folder, rather than uploading it into your Uploads folder first and having to move it later.

If you’re wondering what happens to your designs when you delete images, you can rest assured that Canva preserves media within any design where it’s already being used, so deleting an image from your account won’t cause any issues with existing designs.

Your designs will remain intact as long as you don’t intentionally go into your trash and choose to permanently delete an image.

And then when you’re working on a design inside of Canva’s editor and you need to access one of your uploaded images, instead of going to the Uploads section of your left hand navigation to retrieve that image, you’ll see that you can access your custom folders though the Projects tab.

Bulk Organizing

Once you have your folders setup, it’s going to be time to start moving your designs and images into their new homes, so let’s briefly walk through the steps to batch organize inside Canva. That is, to select and move or select and delete multiple designs and images at one time.

If you’ve ever hovered over a Canva design or image, you will have noticed that a check box appears and when you select multiple files, you will notice that a folder icon appears in the bottom middle of the page, next to a trash icon.

When you hover over that icon, it will say “move to folder”, and when you click on the folder icon, you will have the ability to choose which folder to move the selected files to.

You can locate a folder through under this area called “Recent” which shows the most recently accessed folders, or you can browse through all of your Projects folders to find the desired folder, or you can search for a desired folder by searching on the folder name in this search bar.

Once you’ve chosen the destination folder, you’ll simply click on the option move the files and then Canva will move all of those files off of your Projects page and into your chosen folder.

Organization Differences Between Canva’s Free & Paid Plans

I mentioned earlier that there were three organization related differences in the free Canva plan as compared to Canva Pro.

I already talked about tagging only being available on Pro, but there are a couple more to be aware of, and those are specifically the number of items you can store in a folder, and the total storage space allotted to your account.

In terms of the number of items you can have in a folder, on the free plan you can have 200 items whereas on Canva Pro it’s 1000 items.

And in terms of storage, on a free plan you’ll have 5GB of space whereas you’ll have 1TB of storage space on Canva Pro, so if you have a lot of images or videos that you’re organizing in your account, you’re going to find that storage space gets used up fairly quickly, whereas you’ll have a lot more storage capacity on a Pro account.

Otherwise, your experience using and moving content into folders should be the same regardless of which plan you’re on.

But if you are on Canva’s free plan and you want to want to test out the pro organization features like tagging and increased storage space, you can test it out for 30 days at no cost.

At the end of the day, I don’t like to spend money on things that don’t hold value for me, so I’d definitely recommend you try out the Pro features for yourself to see if the value is there for you before you spend any money on it.

A Canva Organization Framework

So let’s move on to do a quick overview of a framework you can use to help you get organized in Canva.

Because once you know how to set up folders and move designs and images into them, you have what you need in terms of the mechanics to get organized, but you may be feeling a little stuck on what your next steps should be.

So I’m going to walk you through 5 steps and once you’re comfortable with the organizing process, you will likely find that you’re able to do more than one step concurrently… but I’d suggest breaking it down into steps when you’re new to the process.

Step 1: Delete & Archive

The first step is focused on deleting and archiving your unneeded Canva designs and images.

If you were organizing piles of paper in an office or a filing cabinet, you would start by disposing of the papers that you no longer need.

You would also archive into long-term storage the documents that you may need for reference but that you’re no longer actively using.

The same process applies for your digital content, including your Canva designs.

So I’d recommend you take a stroll down memory lane and review all of the designs in your Canva account.

Delete any of the designs you know you don’t need. For example, you may have:

• Copies of the templates you never ended up using
• Duplicates of designs you thought you would need (but didn’t)
• Designs that are super outdated that you know you won’t need

And so on.

For those of you who are afraid to let go of any designs in case you might need it in the future, I would encourage you to create an Archive folder and move all of those “but what if I need it down the road” designs into that folder. If you haven’t needed to access those archived designs in the next year, chances are good that you will feel safer doing a purge of them down the road.

Step 2: Review & Rename

Next up is to do a review of what’s left in your Canva account after you’ve finished deleting and archiving and to update your naming conventions.

If you’re like most Canva users, you probably have a lot of designs named things like “Copy of Template XYZ or “Final Version” until you realize it wasn’t actually the final version, or “Untitled Design” because sometimes, we just skip naming altogether.

If you’re not intentionally and descriptively naming your designs at the time of creation, it’s very easy to end up with vague or overly generic names that can make it nearly impossible to find what you need when you need it.

It’s important to name your files in a descriptive manner so you can easily tell at a glance what all of your designs are from the outside, and also so you can more easily search for your designs using the Canva search bar.

And as I said, once you’re comfortable using the organization features in Canva, you’re going to be able to do more than one step concurrently, so for example, while I’m organizing a client’s account to delete or archive content, I am typically renaming designs simultaneously.

Step 3: Plan & Create Folders

Your third step is going to be to plan and create your folders.

Write down a list of all the categories and subcategories you think you’ll need to organize your designs, images and video.

There is no one-size fits all solution about how to break down your folders within Canva.

Some of you will only need a small handful of folders. Others will need a really robust filing system.

As an example, my own Canva account is broken down into multiple folders as you can see here, and then those primary folders are further broken down into subfolders as needed.

When organizing your Canva workspace, I strongly recommend limiting the number of top-level folders to what you can see at a glance without scrolling. For most people, this often means around 12-13 folders—I have 12 myself.

I find this number strikes a balance: it’s manageable and avoids decision fatigue, while still providing enough categories to cover all your content. If you have too many top-level folders, it’s easy to start feeling overwhelmed by too many choices, and the whole point of organizing is to make things simpler, not more complicated.

I like to draw a parallel here with website navigation design, which was always a key consideration during my years running a website development company. Just like with Canva folders, organizing a website’s primary navigation menu involves finding that sweet spot between too much and too little.

You want your primary menu options to be general enough to group related subpages underneath, but also specific enough that it’s clear where users can find the information they’re looking for.

If you have too many top-level folders in Canva, each time you go to find a design, you’re forced to sift through a long list of folders, which slows you down and creates friction.

But if you have too few folders, they might be overly general and vague, making it hard to locate the content you need.

And here’s a quick tip: if you ever find yourself hesitating over where to put away a design or image, that friction is a sign that your folder structure might need to be re-evaluated. Pay attention to where you’d naturally go looking for that file. Your folder structure should align with your intuition.

Once you have your initial list of folders, you can start actually creating your custom folders and subfolders in order to begin building your own Canva filing cabinet.

Or you may find it makes more sense to create your folders as you go through the category creation process. Whatever feels most natural to you.

Step 4: Move Your Canva Files

Once you’ve got your folders setup so that your designs and images all have homes, you can use the batch organizing technique that I talked about earlier in order to begin moving all of your files into your new folders.

Step 5: Maintain Your Canva Account Organization

And your final step will be to maintain your organization. Once you finish getting through the first 4 steps of this process, your organization system should be in good shape, but even the best system will fall apart if you don’t maintain your Canva account.

You can create a recurring task on your calendar or your project management tool of choice to do your Canva organization on a weekly or bi-weekly or even a monthly basis.

And I’d also recommend a periodic deep clean of your Canva account to review the contents of your folders and to delete and archive as needed. This doesn’t need to be very often, but this will also give you an opportunity to re-assess your folder system and whether it’s still working for you.