Figma Ships Nested Folders, Then Fields a Wave of Complaints Over Lost File Previews

Overview

Figma began rolling out nested folders on August 3, 2026, replacing its long-standing “Projects” structure with folders that can be nested inside one another, according to Figma’s help center, which states: “These changes take effect starting on August 3, 2026, and will take a few weeks to roll out to all users.” On Figma’s community forum, staff member Tom Reem announced the change the same day, writing “Projects become folders. All files in Teams will live in folders,” while clarifying: “Workspaces and teams — these structures will stay exactly the same as before,” according to the forum post.

What We Know

On paid plans, according to the help center article, users “can now create folders inside other folders, up to 10 levels deep.” The depth limit applies broadly to paid tiers, but folder creation itself is capped by plan: “On the Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans, you can create unlimited folders and can nest folders up to 10 levels deep.” By contrast, “On the Starter plan, you can create one folder.”

The update also overhauls how access permissions work. The previous three-option system is gone. “The ‘View only’ setting no longer exists,” the help center states, replaced by two states: “Inherited (“Anyone in [Parent name] can access”): the folder inherits access from its parent,” and “Limited (“Only people added to [Resource name] can access”): you’ve restricted access to specific people.” On the forum, Figma emphasized that the migration preserved existing access: “The same people who had access to the project before have access to the folder now.”

In a company blog post describing how the feature was built, Figma called nested folders “a long-requested feature that helps growing teams keep their files organized as they scale content and tackle complex projects,” and said building it “required rethinking Figma’s underlying content and permissions model from the ground up — everything from the file browser and admin controls to sharing, permissions, and core infrastructure.” Software engineer Ethan Adams described the team’s development approach: “Rather than debating product requirements (“Who should have access to X?”) in sprawling Slack threads or meetings, we led with code as the proposal.” Product designer Cai Charniga said the project blurred traditional role boundaries: “I have a confession: My PR count is pretty low for this project. Two, maybe three. I didn’t magically cross over and become an engineer, but we all started stepping into roles that used to exclusively belong to someone else.” The blog post also says the team gathered early feedback at Figma’s Config conference and through community groups: “Friends of Figma communities in Jaipur, Barcelona, Mumbai, and Lahore became early adopters.”

User Reaction

Within days of the rollout, users replying on Figma’s own forum thread raised several complaints. Several focused on the loss of visual file previews at the folder level. User Tim_hfg1 wrote on August 6: “Compared to the previous Project view, Parent Folders are now very small and do not provide any visual preview.” User Irine asked on August 10 to “bring back the preview cards with files inside each folder” because they “recognized folders more quickly via these preview thumbnails.” User Alejandro Mejias wrote on August 13 that they had “designed my project covers specifically to make them easy to find” through visual navigation.

Other users flagged the new folder-color feature as hard to distinguish. User Apolline asked on August 11, “Can you tell which one of these is purple at first glance?” User MattFannin wrote the same day: “The folder colours feature does me feel a little colour blind, not sure this is a particularly helpful feature as it is?” Separately, users Angel Martin and furax75 reported that sort order does not persist when navigating folders, with Angel Martin writing on August 10 that “every time I leave a folder and come back, it resets itself to last modified and I have to do it all over again.” User Arthur reported on August 16 that new API endpoints — “GET /v2/teams/:team_id/folders and GET /v2/folders/:folder_id/files” — “both return 404 Not found” when used with personal access tokens.

Tom Reem replied on the thread on August 17, acknowledging the feedback: “Making folders easier to scan. A lot of you navigate visually and many of you design covers specifically so the right project jumps out,” according to the forum post.

What We Don’t Know

Figma’s forum post does not give a committed timeline for addressing the preview, color-contrast, sort-persistence, or API complaints raised by users. The rollout itself is also still in progress — Figma’s own sources describe it only as taking “a few weeks to roll out to all users” from the August 3 start date, without a confirmed completion date.