When customers first migrate to Kinship, it's common to upload content that's been stored either locally or on a shared network drive. Often, a lot of thought has been given to folder structure and naming conventions to help keep things organized.

Now, when you upload content from folders to your Kinship library, you can choose to automatically have Kinship assign the content to lists based on the names of the folders where it's stored.

What are lists?

Lists in Kinship are a great way to organize your Revit content library. You can look at them like tags, only better, to help you categorize your library according to whatever criteria makes it easy for you and your team to find and manage.

Teams use lists to group their library by discipline, sector, room types, standards, etc. A family can belong to multiple lists, making it a very flexible way to categorize your Revit content to group and filter it however you like.

For a more detailed overview of lists, see our original post when lists were first added to Kinship.

Lists on autopilot

Previously, you could only assign content to lists from the Kinship website, after it was already added to your library. This meant it was a two-step process if you wanted to get new Revit content onto a list – first you had to add it to the library and then go into the library and assign it to a list.

We received feedback from multiple customers that this workflow was a bit cumbersome, especially if content was coming into the library from different uploads around the same time. In addition, some customers wanted a quick and easy way to apply their previous folder-based classification using lists, in order to keep their library structure consistent as they migrated their content and team to Kinship.

Based on that feedback, we saw an opportunity to streamline workflows and eliminate tedious admin tasks for those managing their Revit content library. We’ve now introduced two new features to simplify and automate the process of getting new library content onto lists.

First, you can choose to add any uploaded content to a new or existing list. This applies to content added from folder uploads as well as individual RFA uploads and content added from within models.

For example, when importing new content from a healthcare template model, you can choose to upload all of it to a new “Healthcare” list, with every piece of content going straight there. This offers an easy way to identify new content that you need to review, content that comes from a particular source or content that belongs to a particular team of users within your firm.

Second, for content added via folder uploads, you can choose to have Kinship automatically create lists and assign content to them based on your folder structure. For every piece of content that’s uploaded, Kinship will add it to a new list for each folder and sub-folder that it’s a part of.

For example, imagine that you’re uploading a folder of content called “Education” with two sub-folders for “High Schools” and “Elementary Schools”. Everything that gets uploaded (from inside both the parent folder and sub-folders) would be assigned to a list called “Education”, while everything in “High Schools” would also be assigned to a list called “Education - High Schools”, and everything in “Elementary Schools” would also be assigned to “Education - Elementary Schools”. From there, it’s easy to rename or reorganize the mapped lists according to whatever final structure is desired.

You’ll see these two new options when selecting Add to Library from the Kinship add-in in Revit. The second option will only appear when choosing the Folders sub-option. Note that these options are only available to administrators and content managers, which are the user roles with permissions to add approved content to the library.

A smooth migration

At Kinship, we're focused on automating as much as possible so you're free to focus your time on more valuable things. If you're used to a folder-based system for keeping your content organized, you may be concerned that migrating everything to a cloud-based content management system could be a lot of work and risk disrupting your workflow.

Thanks to our new features for assigning content to lists, categorizing the content you import to your library is no longer a time-consuming process. Now it’s quicker than ever to get your library set up in a way that makes sense for your team and avoids disrupting the way you like to work.