At the moment items (‘papers’) show the folders they have been added to via 'Filled in '. No such indication exists for shared folders. As I use folders for projects, and some of my projects are collaborative, items are not classed anywhere but in the shared folders. Hence it would be very useful to identify the folders an item is in at a glance.
A potential UI solution for this that would be lighter on the (already crowded) item cards would be to highlight (e.g. via a little vertical colored bar) the folders in the hierarchical view to the left. If those highlight boxes/bars would be on/off buttons (sort of checkboxes) that could almost replace the current folder drop-down, although admittedly the interaction with hierarchical folding has to be thought through. I suggest three box states: filled (item is in folder), unfilled (item is not in folder or descendants), half-filled (greyed), item is in a descendant.
A further suggestion (feel free to spawn a separate thread) is to merge local vs. shared folder trees; shared folders would be identified by some UI element. Again the embedding relationships are the issue here.
I agree, it would be really helpful if the items in the reference list also indicated the shared folders they are in. At the moment both labels and normal folders are indicated and this is great, but managing a shared folder has to be done manually. Also the exported bibtex will show the labels and folders under ‘keywords’ but not the shared folders.
Simply allowing the labels to be used in the shared folder would be great for me. As it is, shared records are difficult to organise as folders are not always appropriate and finding unshared references is problematic unless the local and shared folders are manually maintained as mirror images of one another.
There are two separate issues in this thread. One how to indicate that an item is in a shared folder. That’s basically a UI problem (a tricky one as @meteore pointed out) because things are getting really crowded.
Another issue is that it’s suggested to mix shared folder with private folders and labels. That’s not a UI issue it affects the whole sharing model. We could not find a sane scenario where this would work. There are so many things to consider and I don’t think there is a clean solution that would be superior to what we have now.