Fixing Canva Chaos: What I Learned from a Canva Verified Expert
If you’ve ever opened your Canva account and felt a little wave of dread at all the folders named “Untitled Design,” you’re not alone, and honestly, neither am I. That’s exactly why I kicked off our new podcast series, Pinterest Wins, with someone who has genuinely figured this out: Brenda Cadman, one of only 43 Canva Verified Experts in the world (and just two in Canada). Brenda spends her days helping business owners untangle their Canva accounts so content creation takes less time and way less mental energy. Since Pinterest thrives on consistency, I wanted to know exactly how she’d tell us to get organized, and she did not disappoint.
Related: Troubleshooting Pinterest Images
Is Canva Pro Actually Worth It?
We started with the question I get asked constantly: free or paid? Brenda’s take is that it really depends on how you’re using Canva. If it’s just for personal projects, free is often fine. But the moment you’re using it for a business, one feature makes the paid plan worth it: the Brand Kit. This is where you store your logo, brand colors, fonts, and go-to imagery so you’re never hunting for the right hex code or a decent version of your logo again. Her advice if you’re on the fence about upgrading: don’t just start a free trial and hope you’ll “figure it out.” Decide in advance exactly what you want to test during those 30 days, or the trial will blow by and you’ll be no closer to a decision.
Purge Before You Organize
This was probably my favorite part of the conversation. Brenda’s background is actually in professional organizing for physical filing systems, and she brings that same philosophy to Canva. Her rule: don’t build folders to organize things you don’t even need to keep. Before creating any structure, go through your designs and uploads and sort everything into three buckets: keep, archive, or trash. Only after that purge do the natural categories start to reveal themselves, whether that’s a Social Media folder, a Clients folder, or a Pinterest folder. And since Canva doesn’t have native archiving, a single “Archive” folder does the job just fine.
Where Projects and Templates Fit In
Brenda pointed out something I hadn’t thought about clearly before: the Canva homepage is not your filing cabinet, “Projects” is. That’s where you actually build folders and move things in. She also drew a helpful distinction between regular templates (which come in as designs you can accidentally overwrite) and Brand Templates (which always generate a fresh copy so you never lose the original). Her recommended flow: rename any template the moment you get it, drop it into a Templates folder, and once you’ve customized it into something you’ll reuse, publish it as a Brand Template so there’s always one clear “source of truth,” instead of 47 slightly different versions of the same pin.
Naming, Teams, and Your Quick-Win Homework
For teams, which hits close to home for us at Simple Pin since multiple people touch our account, Brenda suggested agreeing on a labeling system, like a consistent prefix for each client or campaign, so anyone can search and find what they need without becoming a bottleneck. But if you only do one thing this week, she said to skip the folders entirely and go straight to your Uploads tab. That’s where dead weight piles up fastest: duplicate photo shoots, five-year-old files, images you forgot you ever added. Thanks to Canva’s newer range-select and select-all features, clearing it out is faster than ever, and it’s the kind of low-effort win that builds momentum for tackling the rest of your account.
You can find more from Brenda, including her guide on what to test during a Canva Pro trial, at brendacadman.com.
You can find this podcast episode by going to Apple or Spotify.
For More Pinterest Marketing Resources:
Brenda’s Website: https://brendacadman.com
What to Do First When You Start Your Canva Pro Free Trial:
Brenda Cadman, Canva Verified Expert – YouTube
Shop: Grab our Pinterest templates for just $7 – Pinterest Templates – Simple Pin Shop
Watch: Design pins in Canva that Actually Get Clicks
Episode Transcript
Kate [00:00:00]: Hey there, and welcome back to another episode of The Simple Pin Podcast. Welcome to Pinterest Wins. This is a brand-new series where I’m going to bring in experts, or real people who aren’t experts in this space but have a specific piece of the Pinterest puzzle figured out, and they are winning. We start with something this week that affects almost every one of us, and that is your Canva system, or let’s be honest, your lack of one.
I’m going to make a guess. You’ve been using Canva for your Pinterest content for a while now, and if I went into your account, I’d find some version of chaos. Ours is a little chaotic too. Folders may be named Untitled Design, or you can’t find it. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into Canva and searched based on every name I can think of, and I simply cannot find the folder I’m looking for.
Maybe templates you’ve duplicated five times [00:01:00] because you couldn’t find the original, a brand kit you once set up and never touched again. Sound familiar? That’s what we’re going to fix today. Today’s guest is one of a very small group of people in the world. Brenda Cadman is a Canva Verified Expert, one of only 43 in the world and only two in Canada, and she helps small business owners get their Canva accounts organized so content creation takes less time and less mental energy.
Amen to that. And on Pinterest, where consistency is everything, having a system for creating pins can make a huge difference between showing up and burning out. So let’s dive into my interview with Brenda Cadman.
Brenda, welcome to The Simple Pin Podcast.
Brenda [00:01:56]: Well, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited.
Kate: You have a distinguished title that rare… only a few people in the world [00:02:00] get: Canva Verified Expert. Tell me how you got to this place, and when you were bestowed with this title.
Brenda: So you’re correct, there are currently only 43 of us in the world who are part of the CVE program. There are only two of us in Canada. There have been different iterations of the program over the years. Before this one, they had Canva Certified Creatives, and that was the first program I joined. I think it was late 2019 when I joined that program, and I was accepted into it simply because I was creating a lot of content about helping business owners use Canva more effectively and efficiently. That really is the key to being invited into the program.
There’s no application process. It’s only about getting on the radar of product managers and community managers who notice what you’re creating, and a little bit of luck as well. But this current version of the program, honestly, I’m trying to remember if it was 2022 [00:03:00]… I can’t remember the exact year. It feels like I’ve only been in this role—
Kate: It all blurs together after COVID.
Brenda: It does. It’s like there’s a before and after COVID, and the years run together. It’s very much a “before times” and “after times.”
Kate: Yep.
Brenda: So it was sometime in the middle after times. And that original Canva Certified Creatives program got narrowed down to just 25 of us when the CVE program launched, so I was the first Canadian in that as well.
And it just became the focus of what I do. I ran a website development company for over 20 years, and gradually found I was getting a lot more questions about how I was creating my slides in my courses, how I was creating my lead magnets, how I was creating the different assets I used in my marketing, as opposed to questions about websites specifically.
So it was clear there was an opportunity for educating around that, and over time I realized that’s where my heart was. I retired the website business in 2022, and it’s been all Canva, all the [00:04:00] time since then.
Kate: Wow, so cool. Okay, I want to start from there, kind of ground up, looking at Canva as a whole, because you love teaching it and helping people organize it.
So you have this intimate understanding of it. A big question we get a lot is whether the Canva Pro paid account is worth it, and I understand where that comes from, because there are so many different types of accounts you can pay for right now. So in your expert opinion, free or paid, what would you tell someone?
Brenda: It really comes down to what you want to create and how you’re using it. If you’re using it just to support, say, projects for your church, or personal things like birthday invitations, you’re not going to need access to a lot of the features on the paid account.
Now, if you want access to a lot of the generative AI features, or even some of the assistive AI features, you’re probably going to need Pro. But for a lot [00:05:00] of people who don’t need it for a business capacity, the free account is really fine. I do believe there’s a clear division, though: the moment you start using it to support a business, there’s one feature specifically that makes a huge difference, and that’s the Brand Kit.
If you don’t have a Pro account, you won’t have access to create your brand assets in a Brand Kit, and that Brand Kit is such a time saver. I focus a lot on organization and folder structures, but a big part of working more effectively and efficiently in Canva really comes down to the things you do for your workflow that make things faster and easier, so you can focus on getting the thing done and getting back to what’s really important in your business.
So if you’re using it in any capacity for a business, I do think it’s important to at least trial the paid account. And then, if the value is there for you, wonderful. If it’s not, now you know. But don’t go into testing the Pro account until you know specifically what you want to test, because I think too often people sign up for the 30-day trial. They mean to come back and test it, but they don’t exactly know what’s different between the plans, and 30 days elapses very quickly. Suddenly they’re being charged, and they still don’t know if the value was there for them.
So, try it out, but be sure you know what you’re going to test. I’ve even put together a blog post outlining exactly what I want you to test in those 30 days, so you can make a clear decision one way or the other.
Kate: Perfect. We’ll get that link for you and put it in the show notes, because I think people want the guide and want to walk through it. They don’t want to waste money, and they don’t want to get to that 30-day mark feeling like, “Okay, I didn’t put any money in, but now I feel like I need to test it properly.” And you mentioned one thing I’m curious if people know about. We know about it here at Simple Pin because we manage accounts for multiple clients, and our Canva account has all of this. But you said Brand Kit. For the people listening who are thinking, “What? I didn’t even know this was in there,” explain what a Brand Kit is inside Canva.
Brenda: When you’re in your Canva dashboard, on the left-hand side of your screen, you’re going to see different options. You’ll see Home at the top, you’ll see Projects, which we’re going to talk about a lot today, but you’ll also see Brand. Essentially, your Brand Kit is a place to consolidate all of your visual brand assets. You can put your logos there, your color palettes, your fonts. You can put all kinds of brand imagery in there too: photos, graphics, illustrations, patterns, textures, whatever you use on a regular basis that’s part of your visual brand and your brand’s look and feel. It’s all housed in one easy-to-access place when you’re working in the editor.
They even rolled out, last year, the ability to create your own categories. Maybe you don’t have a lot of photos but you have a lot of different illustrations or icons; everybody’s a little different in terms of what they use in their own brand. But it lets you personalize the organization of those brand assets, so it’s really easy to find what you’re looking for.
Now, this isn’t a place you’re going to upload all of your images to. It should really be the images you come back to on a regular basis, the ones that form what people have come to expect and recognize as part of your visual brand. But at a minimum, even if you don’t have all of those extra assets, you’re going to have a logo, even if it’s just a word mark. That should be in there, and it should be the right version, your source of truth for the most current logo everyone should be using. You definitely want to put your color palette in there too. You don’t want to be searching for exact hex values every single time; you want to make sure you’re using the same specific color values every time. And your fonts should be in there as well. If you’re not on Pro, you won’t be able to upload custom fonts, and there’s no guarantee the fonts you’ve come to use as part of your brand will be in the free Canva library, and there’s no workaround for that. I can help you find a consolidated place for logos, graphics, and colors. I can’t upload your specific font for you if you’re not on the paid plan.
Kate: Right. Yeah, so that’s a real limitation. Okay, so how long would you say it takes somebody to build their Brand Kit? Say they’ve decided, “Yes, I’m going to do paid, I want to build my Brand Kit.” How much time does it take to build it, and how much time do you think it saves them once it’s built?
Brenda: The building part, actually putting it into Canva, isn’t going to take long. Again, I’ve got videos walking through exactly the steps for that. The time really goes into compiling the components. If you don’t know your color values, you’re going to have to go find those. If you don’t have a summary of what those colors are, there are tools you can use to figure out the hex values. You’re going to need to compile those color values, figure out which fonts you’re using. This is a good time to decide which ones you want to use consistently going forward. You might have to get those fonts uploaded if they’re not in Canva’s library. You’ll need to track down and confirm you have the right version of your logo. You want something with a transparent background, something high resolution enough to look good on the content you’re creating, because if all you have is a tiny, pixelated JPEG version of your logo, anything you put it on is going to immediately look, I’m afraid to say, amateur, not professional. So you want to make sure you’re working with high quality assets. Once you’ve compiled all of that, actually uploading it into Canva is really quick.
Kate: Okay, and then that saves them, well, think about how much time it would take to upload it every single time.
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Brenda: Exactly. It’s a small amount of time each time you do it, but cumulatively that adds up, and let’s not undervalue the frustration it saves you every time you’re looking for that specific logo or color value. It’s right there at your fingertips. Over time, that saves so much time in terms of searching and tracking things down, but also the decision fatigue that comes from having to reassess every time: is this the right logo to be using? That “source of truth” element isn’t thought about as much. You think about the efficiency and the time you save, but also just knowing with confidence that you’re using the right colors, the right font, and the right logos. That goes a long way toward easing your mind too.
Kate: Yes, the mental load.
Brenda: Yeah.
Kate: Okay, so let’s walk through this idea of building an organized Canva account. We’ve got the paid plan, now we have the Brand Kit. Now we get into where I’d say a lot of the mess happens. Let’s take the example of a content creator, whether they’re selling on Amazon or running a website. We start to pull in all these images, right? And we might feel confident, like, “We’ve got a Brand Kit, we’re totally set and ready to go,” but our brand uses Instagram images, TikTok images, all these different things. How do you begin to structure folders and projects so you’re not just doing things one-off? I’m guilty of this: I’ll create an Instagram post and not even know what it’s nested under, and then I’ll create Pinterest pins separately. People feel like they’re doing all this other stuff for their brand, and their Pinterest pins become an afterthought. The biggest question we get is, “I’m creating all these new images, I’m churning them out, but they’re not really optimized.” So let’s start there: a content creator has a ton of stuff, and needs project folder organization.
Brenda: What’s interesting is the first instinct is usually, “Okay, let’s create a folder to put it in.” I’d actually encourage people to pause and step back a little, because we don’t want to be creating folders to organize things we don’t actually need to have in our account in the first place. I’m a big organizing nerd; before this, I ran a professional organizing company that focused specifically on filing cabinets and filing systems for businesses and professionals. One of the first things we’d do when tackling a filing cabinet overhaul is we wouldn’t create folders for junk. You need to do a purge first. It’s a really easy, low-lift way to get into the momentum of doing this. You don’t need to start by thinking about what folder categories and labels you need. Let’s start by making three quick decisions about everything that’s in there. Is it something you want to keep? Is it something you want to keep but don’t need regular access to, so maybe you just want to archive it? Or do you not need this at all, and it’s trash? If it’s trash, delete it. If you want to archive it, create a single folder called Archive. There’s no native archiving functionality in Canva, but it’s as simple as creating a folder. And then for the things you’re not sure about, maybe you’ll refer to them later, maybe you’ll repurpose them, maybe you just want to keep them for nostalgia and to see how far you’ve come. I’m not here to say you have to get rid of things. That’s one of the beautiful things about digital clutter versus physical clutter: there’s a lot more flexibility to accommodate it. But I don’t want you to have to come up with a specific organization structure for something that just needs to go into a catch-all or Archive folder.
So go through and pare things down. Do the same thing for your Uploads folder as well, since this applies to your images too, not just your designs. As you go through that process, you’ll start to get a real sense of what you’re creating. Yes, you’ll have pins in there, probably a lot of them if you’re actively working on a Pinterest account. But you’ll also see lead magnets you’ve created, presentations you’ve given, maybe onboarding guides. You’ll start to see clusters of types of content, and it’s a good opportunity to jot things down as you go, without the pressure of finalizing a structure right away. But clear things out and look at what you actually want to keep. It’ll become pretty clear what some of those top-level categories are. A Social Media folder is probably going to be at the top level; most people are going to need that. If you work with clients, you may have a Clients folder at the top, plus the Archive folder I mentioned. You can create subfolders in Uploads now too; you couldn’t when I started working with Canva. I’ve naturally created an image filing system in my projects as well: I have a Photos folder, and I have one for personal use, because I like to separate my personal stuff from my business stuff. Everybody’s folders are going to be a little different, but you’ll naturally start to see what those high-level chunks are, and that’s where you can start creating top-level folders. You don’t have to worry about the granular child structure underneath them yet; just get those top buckets to start with, and then you can start making easy decisions like, “This is for an Instagram reel, that goes into Social Media. Here’s a batch of pins, into Social Media.” You can build out the more detailed structure underneath as you go along, but it gives you a great first place to start.
Kate: Yeah, so the two takeaways for somebody: first, go through and think of it like a messy closet, and purge everything. You wouldn’t try to put new things into a messy closet; you actually want to get rid of what you don’t want to use first, to create space for the new. And second, start to create a folder structure that makes sense. I think of it as looking at it from a 10,000-foot level; we’re not getting super granular, but we’re looking at the whole thing, kind of like our Canva nav bar. Then we can go into these big containers and get more granular from there. So where do Projects fit into this folder structure?
Brenda: Projects is the folder structure. It’s Canva’s environment for building out those folders. One of the most common questions I get is, “Why can’t I organize from the homepage?” And trust me, that’s something I’ve raised. I had a Zoom call with some of the product team at Canva last week, and I told them, “This is really important.” Everybody, that initial homepage is really designed to be a landing page for doing all kinds of things, and they’re constantly iterating and trying to improve it, so it’s hard to make everybody happy, of course. But that homepage doesn’t have that filing capacity. You can’t create folders there, and you can’t move things in. Right now, it’s just a stream of your most recent documents and designs, plus the ability to start new ones.
So what you want to do is go straight to Projects. If you don’t see a left-hand navigation bar, there’s a small icon at the top left that expands it, and then you want to go into Projects. Specifically, you want “Your Projects.” If you go to “All Projects,” you’ll just see a mess of things.
Kate: Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s a mess.
Brenda: Especially if you’ve already started organizing, everything just surfaces and bubbles up together, and it’s a bit of a mess; that’s something else I know they’re working to improve. But if you go to “Your Projects,” this is your filing cabinet. This is where you can create folders and access your uploads. If you’ve narrowed it down to just your projects, you can see everything that still needs to be put into a folder, because if it’s on that “Your Projects” page, it’s not in a folder yet. So this is where you can actually start dragging things in and seeing what’s left to deal with.
Kate: Oh, okay, so work from that environment. Projects is where you want to be creating your filing system. Okay, let’s walk through a practical example that we have here at Simple Pin. In our Simple Pin shop, we sell $7 templates [00:21:00] for different types of businesses in Canva. People buy those, download them, and add them to Canva. What’s a good workflow for them? We obviously walk through how you can build it in Canva, but we’re not addressing structure. So I’d imagine it’s very easy to just upload these and start working on them, and forget to organize them into a folder. If you could walk us through the workflow of somebody who buys a template in the Simple Pin shop, what are the next steps?
Brenda: One of the top-level folders I’d encourage most people to have, if they buy or get templates through various memberships or courses, is a Templates folder. There are two kinds of templates in Canva to think about. There are templates you get from other people or from Canva’s library that you’re going to customize for your own needs, and then there are Brand Templates, which come from the Brand Kit area of things as well. Brand Templates are something that, once you publish something as a Brand Template, any time you go to use it, it automatically generates a copy. So you’re never going to overwrite it. Whereas templates you pull in from a library or from a provider like yourself come in as a design. That’s fine, but it’s really easy to overwrite by accident.
So the workflow I’d recommend: if I got a template of yours, you’d share a template link with me. When I click on that link, it lets me know that Kate at Simple Pin has shared a template with you. I click on that, and it generates a copy of that template design into my own account, which is great, if you don’t have a lot of them. But if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with a template graveyard. So the first thing I’d do is rename it in a way that makes sense to me, because I might not know what it is if I come back to it weeks later. I’ll rename it right away, since it comes in labeled “copy of,” and I don’t want to see any “copy ofs.” I want something that’s clear about what it is. Then I put it into a Templates folder, collecting them there. Depending on how many templates you have, you might break that Templates folder into subfolders by source: template provider A, provider B, and so on, if you think you’ll go back and retrieve a template based on where you got it. Or if you’ll think about accessing it by type, you might have subfolders instead for, say, Pinterest templates and Instagram templates.
It really comes down to the individual and how they naturally retrieve information. This is why I’m not a big fan of the carousels out there that say, “These are the five folders every business owner must have in Canva,” because how you organize isn’t how I organize. What you do in your business isn’t what I do in mine. It’s a very individual thing, and if you try to take somebody else’s structure and put it on your own, maybe it’ll work, at least initially, but it’s probably going to be harder to maintain if it doesn’t intuitively work with how you naturally go looking for information.
So we’ve got the copy of the template, we’ve got a Templates folder for your future-use templates, the ones you’re probably going to use. Once you’ve customized a template to fit your own content and brand, if it’s one you want to reuse over and over, because we all have a set of pin templates we repurpose, changing the photo and the text but keeping the core template the same, that’s when you’ll want to go in and save it as a Brand Template. Once it’s a Brand Template, I’d personally store it in my Pinterest folder, so when I go to create new pins, I have the Brand Template right there to access.
Because if you don’t create a system to organize your templates, you’ll get a real mixture of designs and templates. You won’t know what’s what, or what the most recent version is that you worked on. What happens sometimes is you build a set of pin templates, and they slowly mutate over time, until suddenly you have 47 versions of the same pin and you’re not sure which one you’re supposed to be using. And then you’re afraid to delete any of them, because they all look like they might be in use. So getting into the habit of maintaining a structure so you know which is the source of truth, and publishing it in a format where it’s undeniable that it’s the source, is really the key. However many templates you have, what that system looks like in the folder is a very individual thing, but making sure you’ve got that division between designs and templates is incredibly important.
Kate: Yeah, it really is, because templates are the source of inspiration, and the design is that final piece you get to test. One of the things we talk about with Pinterest is that you don’t just want to change one element of your Pinterest image and think that’s “fresh.” You want to look at that final image you’ve created, maybe go back to the template, and ask, is there something I can do to change up the pin copy? Is there something I can iterate on instead of starting brand new? There’s a real tie between the two, and I think that’s where a lot of people get overwhelmed, because there’s so much organization involved. But if you start with this organized sandbox, it’s not going to feel labor-intensive on the other side.
Brenda: And it removes that decision fatigue I mentioned earlier, because you’re not opening half a dozen similar-looking pins and trying to evaluate which one is right, wondering which was the final version you actually went with, because you were so afraid to overwrite it that you kept duplicating it, and now you’ve got version one, version two, version three, and so on, without knowing where you left off. It becomes a much bigger project to organize if you have to go through and evaluate every single piece, instead of being able to look at it from the outside and know, “Okay, that’s the final one, I can make a copy of that, and if I name it properly, I’ll know it’s version two of the pin.”
Because you might have a set of pins that are similar with just minor layout changes, and that’s fine, but you want it to be easy to distinguish them from the outside instead of having to open every single one. It might only take a couple of minutes to open one, but if you tally up the time you lose searching for content to repurpose, I’d much rather spend that time sitting on my deck.
Kate: Yes, 100%. And one of the things some people listening may relate to: they’re solopreneurs in charge of their own Canva account. We have a team Canva account, with our head designer, our other designers, and people who’ve done social media for us over the years. So when I go in to find something, I have no idea what somebody named it. Maybe I want to look back at 2022, or look back at Instagram content [00:29:00]. Is associating a year with a folder a good naming strategy too, especially if someone did marketing a certain way that year?
Brenda: It can be. I’ve seen, speaking specifically to Pinterest, folders broken down by year and then by month, if that’s how someone thinks about the content they’re creating on a timeline basis. I’ve also seen it broken down more by campaign, or by what pins are promoting, like if someone has a really active blog and that’s what they’re pinning for. Maybe it’s some hybrid of the year created, the month created, and then the blog post title, with pins underneath it. It’s really interesting to see the breadth of ways people organize, especially solopreneurs who are the only ones looking for that content.
If you have team members, there’s an added step of thinking, “I don’t want to be the bottleneck here. How do I set this up in a way that makes sense to somebody else if I’m handing off this process?” So labeling clearly is important, and having a folder structure that makes sense is important. Maybe have a conversation with your team if they’re having a hard time locating things, and agree on a labeling system, like a prefix that’s always added to everything within a specific platform or campaign. I had one client where all of her clients had a three-letter prefix, so if she wanted to find everything related to a specific client, she could search on that prefix and it would all come up in the results, even if she couldn’t find it in the folder structure.
So there are different ways to do it, but you’re absolutely right that with more people involved, you have to figure out a naming structure that makes sense. This is why I think that folder system becomes even more important the more people are involved.
Kate: Yeah, I’d agree. The dreaded word in our company is SOPs. Nobody likes writing them, but everybody loves them once they’re created.
Brenda: Yes. For those who don’t know, that’s Standard Operating Procedures. We all speak this language in Canva; we all want to reap the benefits of organization, but nobody wants to write the SOP.
Kate: That’s the struggle, I get it.
Brenda: Yeah, totally.
Kate: Okay, so somebody’s listening, and they’re calculating all the years they’ve been on Canva. They can picture the messiness. Maybe they have a Brand Kit, but their folders are just a mess. What’s one quick win they could do to start the process of having an organized Canva account?
Brenda: Tackle your Uploads folder. Just put designs aside for now and go into that Uploads folder, because this is where you can often find a lot of dead weight. I’ve lost count of how many business owners’ accounts I’ve seen with upwards of 2,000 images in Uploads, and I’ll find the same brand photo shoot uploaded literally half a dozen times. They uploaded everything again because they couldn’t find it the other times, since they didn’t have a folder system to find it easily. So go through and see: these are all old photos, why did I upload 30 personal photos for a project that was done five years ago, and I don’t need any of this.
And now Canva has just introduced range select as well, thank heavens. Before, you had to drag to select, one chunk at a time. But now, just like in other filing platforms, you can select one image or design with a checkbox, hold shift, and select a whole range of them. I love that feature; it just came out in June. They also finally introduced “select all visible,” so whatever files you can see on the page, you can select all of them at once. So if a huge chunk of what’s on your page doesn’t need to be there, you can select it all in one go, hit the trash icon, and clear it out.
Uploads really does become a dumping ground very easily. I’ve done organizing projects for clients with stuff in there from, I think, 2017, whenever Canva started. We don’t need to keep everything. You can clear a lot of it out and be left with a much lighter project to organize. We can look at creating a filing system for your images after that, but just going through and purging your Uploads folder feels so good, and it doesn’t take a lot of brain power to do.
Kate: Yep, yep. You can grab your favorite beverage, put on whatever you’re binge-watching—
Brenda: Mm-hmm. I finally got around to watching Project Hail Mary the last couple of days.
Kate: You did?
Brenda: Yeah.
Kate: Put that on and start clearing out some of the mess.
Brenda: Yeah, it’s a quick win that gives a lot of lightness, and it’ll probably give you a lot of momentum to carry on.
Kate: Yeah, I love that win, and I hope people take action on this over the next week. Where can people go to connect with you, especially if they’re thinking, “I need more help with Canva, I need more insight”?
Brenda: The best place is my website. I’m a bit of a content machine when it comes to creating blog posts and videos. I also have an active YouTube channel with a lot of very short, quick-win kinds of videos. There’s not a 20-minute ramble about my philosophy on something; we get right into solving the problem. So it’s brendacadman.com, and that’s the best place to find everything I create.
Kate: Perfect. We’ll put that link down below in the show notes, and link to your YouTube channel too, since this will be watched on YouTube and listened to in podcast players. Thank you for kicking off our Pinterest Wins series.
Brenda: I’m happy to. I really believe Canva is a source of inspiration. It’s also a source of frustration for people, and if we can help people understand how to make it work for them in a smarter way instead of working harder, I think it’ll help clear out a lot of that mental junk, so they can see their Pinterest images in a new way and get creative.
Kate [00:36:00]: So I really appreciate you sharing all of this with me, and I hope everybody builds a Brand Kit and goes into their Uploads folder to clear out the junk. That’s actually the first thing we’re going to do. 100%. Thank you so much again for joining me. I really appreciate it.
Brenda: Oh, thanks for having me.
