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S3/Folder Browser

User Guide
InstallConfigurationS3/Folder BrowserDatabase BrowserTable ViewerExploratory Data AnalysisEmbeddingVisualization

Browse S3/folders and preview audios, videos, images and tables

1. Motivation#

Working with multimodal data shouldn't feel like juggling tools. Yet in practice, we constantly switch between folder explorers and specialized viewers, and often copy file paths into scripts or command-line tools just to see what's inside a file. It's distracting and interrupts the creative flow.

When the data lives on S3, everything becomes 10x harder. Listing folders with AWS CLI is slow and unforgiving: one typo and the whole process stops. Downloading files to your laptop takes forever, and even then you still need a mix of manual steps just to inspect them.

SmooSense removes all of this overhead. It brings fast, seamless folder browsing and instant file previews directly to your browser, letting you navigate and inspect S3 data with zero friction, so you can stay focused on insights, not infrastructure.

2. Start in terminal#

To browse a folder on your laptop, you can run

sense folder /path/to/folder               # Browse a specific folder

or a shortcut for browsing the current folder:

sense                                      # Browse current directory

You can also browse S3 "folder" from your laptop:

sense folder s3://smoosense-demo/datasets  # Browse S3 folder

3. Browse folder structure in a tree view and preview files#

FolderBrowser consists of two panels:

  • Left panel โ€“ displays a tree view of the folder and file hierarchy.
  • Right panel โ€“ provides a preview of table files or folders containing media assets.

3.1 Folder navigation#

If you are tired of doing aws s3 ls ..., try the intuitive folder navigation:

๐Ÿ‘‡ Live demo

https://demo.smoosense.ai/FolderBrowser?rootFolder=s3://smoosense-demo/PreviewFiles

3.2 Preview media files (images, videos, audios, pdf)#

Need more file formats? Submit a feature request

SmooSense provides a gallery view that turns any image folder into a visual grid, helping you rapidly browse, compare, and understand large collections of images without opening them one by one.

3.3 Preview data files (json, yaml)#

Need more file formats? Submit a feature request

SmooSense integrates an interactive, tree-view JSON previewer designed to make complex data structures easy to understand at a glance. Instead of staring at raw text, you can visually explore the hierarchy of any JSON field:

  • Expand or collapse dictionaries to reveal nested keys layer by layer.
  • Handle large arrays effortlessly. SmooSense displays the array's total length and shows only the first 100 items, so you get context without overwhelming the UI.
  • Search across keys and values using simple keyword queries, making it easy to locate the information you care about even inside large or deeply nested structures.

This gives you an intuitive, high-level understanding of your JSON data instantly, without downloading files or writing ad-hoc scripts just to inspect structure.

3.4 Preview table files (parquet, csv, jsonl)#

Need more file formats? Submit a feature request

Parquet is a columnar, metadata-rich file format designed for efficient analytic workloads. Parquet stores schema information, column statistics, and row-group metadata directly in its footer. When you want to preview a Parquet file, such as listing columns, data types, row counts, or min/max values, you don't need to download or read the full file. We only needs to fetch the last few kilobytes of the object from S3, where the metadata and column statistics are stored. This makes it possible to inspect very large Parquet files almost instantly, because the preview is based entirely on pre-computed metadata rather than scanning the actual data.

In the example below, you are previewing a huge 7.9 GB parquet file, with 100 million rows and more than 100 columns.

3.5 Preview text files and code scripts (markdown, python)#

Need more file formats? Submit a feature request

Markdown offers a format thatโ€™s easy for humans to write and for LLMs to interpret. Itโ€™s a natural choice for maintaining data documentation and sharing it seamlessly with AI systems.

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