File manager¶

By clicking on the folder icon in the application’s toolbar you’ll get access to the filemanager for importing content in your IPFS repository through the Mutable File System (see MFS).
Settings¶

DAG generation format¶
You can choose between the Balanced DAG format (the default in IPFS) or the Trickle format. This option has an impact on how IPFS will generate the DAG structure for the files that you import.
Importing some content with the Trickle format will generate different CIDs compared to when the same content is being imported with the default Balanced format becauses of the differences in the DAG’s structure (even though the files data is the same).
You might want to use the Trickle DAG format for large files (for instance video files), making DAG traversal potentially faster.
Selecting the working folder¶
The folder selector button lets you select the current working folder in your filesystem (see MFS).
The Temporary and Encrypted files folders are by default in offline mode.
Adding files in the Encrypted files folder will self-encrypt them with your profile’s RSA key (only you will be able to open them). When you open an encrypted file it is first decrypted into an (unpinned, unannounced) IPFS file object which will later on be garbage-collected by the daemon.
Importing your files using the files selection dialogs¶

If you click on the Add files icon you are prompted with a file selection dialog. All files selected will be imported to your IPFS repository. By default your files will be wrapped with a directory in order to preserve filenames (you can change this in the settings).

If you click on the Add directory icon you are prompted with a selection dialog for directories only. This will recursively import the directory, including dotfiles (files and directories starting with . on Linux)
Because the application accesses IPFS in an asynchronous manner, importing even large amounts of data should not cause the application to hang or becoming unresponsive so you can perform other tasks meanwhile, but the file manager will prevent you from adding more content while the import is running.
Importing your files using the local file manager (drag-and-drop)¶

Clicking on the file manager icon will open up a file manager displaying your local files. Just select and drag-and-drop your files from the local file manager to the IPFS file manager on the left and they will be imported to your repository. Multiple selection is supported by holding the Control or Shift keys.
Drag-and-dropping content from other applications is supported as well.
Offline mode¶
The Offline mode button, when toggled, sets the filemanager in offline mode for the current folder (it is a per-folder switch). In this mode, adding new files to your node will not trigger an announcement on the DHT (meaning that other nodes will have no knowledge yet that your node provides these files).
Later on, if you want to manually announce to the network that you provide some files, right-click a file or directory and select Announce (DHT provide) (for a directory, use the recursive version to recursively announce the entire graph).
Keyboard shortcuts¶
The following keyboard shortcuts are available within the files manager:
- Mod + c or Mod + y: Copy selected item’s IPFS path to the clipboard
- Mod + a: Copy selected item’s multihash (CID) to the clipboard
- Mod+x: Explore item if it is a directory