How to Group & Organize Notebooks in NotebookLM (Collections)<br>Skip to main contentEnhance your NotebookLM experience with our free browser extension.<br>Add to ChromeAdd to Firefox<br>View plans

If your NotebookLM homepage has turned into an endless wall of notebook cards, you've probably wondered whether you can group notebooks into folders. The answer is yes — NotebookLM has a native feature for exactly this, called Collections , and with the right tooling it takes seconds to organize everything.

Collections group entire notebooks — by project, course, client, or any structure that fits how you work. They're synced to your Google account, they show up on the NotebookLM homepage (now at notebook.google.com), and they stay put no matter which browser or device you sign in from.

In this guide, I'll show you what collections are, how to create and manage them efficiently with the free NotebookLM Tools extension, and how they compare to the other organization features — folders, labels, and tags.

What Are NotebookLM Collections?

Collections are NotebookLM's built-in way to group notebooks. Each collection has a name and an optional emoji , and groups the notebooks you file into it.

Three properties make collections different from a classic folder tree:

They group notebooks, not sources. A collection lives at the account level and organizes whole notebooks. (To organize the sources inside one notebook, use source folders instead.)

A notebook can belong to several collections. The same notebook can sit in "Thesis", "Spring Semester", and "To Review" simultaneously — no duplicate copies needed.

They're native and synced. Collections are stored in your Google account, not in your browser. They appear on notebook.google.com itself, follow you across devices, and remain even if you uninstall every extension.

NotebookLM (renamed Gemini Notebook by Google in July 2026) provides the basics natively. Where it falls short is management at scale: assigning dozens of notebooks one at a time gets old fast. That's the gap NotebookLM Tools fills.

Collections vs Folders vs Labels vs Tags

NotebookLM organization now spans four features — two native, two added by the extension. Here's the one table to keep straight which does what:

FeatureWhat it groupsNative or extensionSynced?Visual markerBest forCollections NotebooksNative (Google)✅ Google accountEmojiGrouping notebooks by project, course, or clientTags NotebooksExtension (local)❌ This browser only10 custom colorsPrivate, color-coded notebook organizationSource folders Sources in one notebookExtension (local)❌ This browser onlyFolder iconStructuring a big notebook's source listLabels SourcesNative (Google)✅ Synced (with the notebook)Colored chipsAI-grouped source categories, shared with collaborators

Rule of thumb: collections and tags organize your library of notebooks; folders and labels organize the sources inside a notebook. If sources are what you need to structure, start with the source folders guide or the source labels guide.

How to Create a Collection

Directly in NotebookLM

The NotebookLM homepage has a Collections tab where your collections live — Google's own controls cover the basics, with a name and an optional emoji for each collection.

The native flow works fine for a handful of notebooks. It gets tedious when you're filing thirty.

With NotebookLM Tools: the Manage Collections page

Install NotebookLM Tools and open the Manage Collections page — a two-pane workspace built for doing this at scale.

On the left: every collection, searchable and sortable by name or most used , with notebook counts. On the right: the selected collection's details — rename it, set or clear its emoji, add notebooks from a search box, or jump to a filtered view of its members.

Everything you do here writes straight to your NotebookLM account. Create a collection in the extension and it's instantly real on notebook.google.com.

Assign Notebooks in Bulk

This is where the extension pays for itself (it's free, but still). In the notebooks dashboard, select any number of notebooks and choose Add to Collection . Two modes:

Add mode — the selected notebooks join the collection, keeping their existing collections.

Replace mode — the selected notebooks' collections are replaced entirely with your new choice. Perfect for cleaning up an old structure in one pass.

Filing a semester's worth of notebooks takes one selection and one click instead of thirty round-trips through a dialog.

Filter and Find Notebooks

Multi-select filtering and the "Uncollected" filter

Filter your notebook list by one collection or several at once (a notebook matches if it's in any of them). The "Uncollected" filter is the cleanup superpower: it shows exactly the notebooks you haven't filed anywhere yet, so nothing slips through.

Collection chips on the NotebookLM homepage

The extension also shows each notebook's collections as small chips right on the notebook cards at notebook.google.com — with an...