Eagle was originally designed to make users manage their images easier. Just like other popular productivity tools, Eagle adapts the "centralized structures" to manage images you added into Eagle.

Under some contexts, it would not be so convenient to use Eagle to browse other local directories, but on the other hand, we believe the "centralized structures" bring better experiences in most of the time. Let's take "Evernote" as an example, when we manage notes, we don't have to remember the paths or folders of all notes, what we do is just open Evernote and it's found in seconds. Eagle adapted to the same logic. If all resources in Eagle are divided into different paths and directories, we won't be able to achieve a truly efficient and simple experience.

Organizing images with traditional folders may also encounter bottlenecks performance-wise. Let's say if you have tens of thousands of images separated under different directories in PC, you can imagine how bad it would be when searching, especially when you are using HDD disks without a pre-listed index.

Simply put, Eagle used "centralized" management logics that other popular apps used, which brings the following benefits:

Simple and easy
You don't have to memorize where your images are placed. The only thing you need is to open Eagle, and voila!
Higher performance, faster than the regular search bar
There's nothing more intolerable than the slow speed of hard disk search. No matter how many images you have, the search result in Eagle can be shown within 0.5 seconds.
Focus on images instead of files
Just like when you want to surf the internet, the first thing that comes into your mind is to open the browser. We would like to have this kind of intuitive reaction applied to Eagle; when you want to see images, you won't have to search through tons of directories no more, all you need is to open Eagle.

Can I browse directories of my PC in Eagle?