Let's say you have a large catalog of photos and maps on your website. You can easily display them all at once by creating a hyperlink to the folder they're stored in. You could even create different links for subfolders if you've organized things that way. However, there is no way with normal folders to display different content, from different parts of your site based on things like:

• keywords in the title
• date of creation
• author
• type of content

The need for showing content in a variety of dynamic ways has given rise to Smart Folders, or folders that know a thing or two about your content. However, the very name Smart Folder is actually a little misleading because Smart Folders don't actually contain content. They do contain criteria, very similar to a search query, that controls exactly what you see in each Smart Folder.

Applications for Smart Folders are commonly:

• News Archives
• Event Archives
• Photos Displayed by Date Range
• Content Displayed by Keyword
  

Before I get into explaining how to create your own Smart Folder, go on to the next page to see how they work in practice.