Timeline folders. We have them in Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator... precomps can utterly ruin your work and is NOT an alternatives to having a simple folder hierarchy - especially when dealing with shape layers or anything that requires continual rasterization.
Companies can often hold back on publicising breakthrough features they have yet to launch. This, however, is NOT a breakthrough feature. It's the utter lack of recognition that this feature has been requested time and time again, as if it's something so niche that it's irrelevant to most users. It is certainly NOT irrelevant.
What are you Adobe? A secret society that hides its plans from the public? Come on, lots of software companies do upcoming feature lists the are working on. You are not a secret society, you are a public company.
What are you fighting with? You are a biltiondollar company that could do such feature in no time. Why do we have to ask so many times for such useful and requested feature?
Y'all... we all want folders. We have your requests. And we have no new news. And if we did have news, we wouldn't be able to share it until the feature was public.
@Sterphy, what do you want us to respond in the meantime? A lot of the people in this thread responding to you are individual contributors on this team. We're doing our best to advocate for features that we know users want, including folders in the timeline.
@llealloo it was @Sterphy simulation from 2022. We might not have groups for timeline layers but at least we have thread grouping in Adobe Community :))
Any chance you could speak with your team about this feature request and let us know what they say? i.e. How feasible is this from a software engineering standpoint? I am curious to know, because if it is too hard I would like to stop asking about it. It would be nice to hear something/anything from the team at Adobe, because we have been asking for this for over 10 years with no response. Appreciate anything you can do to inform us of the vibe over there!
Warm regards,
Leah - 21 year AE expression & scripting expert, 18 years professional experience in motion graphics
I wanted to bring up a life-saving feature that I believe would greatly improve the workflow in After Effects: layer grouping. Currently, the only way to organize multiple layers is by pre-composing them. However, once layers are pre-comped, all editing is confined to the precomp, making it difficult to adjust them later in the main composition. This is especially challenging for large, complex projects where you might want to maintain a higher level of flexibility.
In comparison, other Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator have implemented the ability to group layers, making it easier to manage elements without losing direct control over the layers themselves. After Effects could benefit from this functionality as well, providing a better way to organize and manipulate layers without resorting to cumbersome precompositions.
I’m aware that this topic has been raised by multiple users in the past, but it’s still not available. I hope that Adobe will consider adding this feature in a future update, as it would significantly enhance the usability and efficiency of the software.