Tags are a great way of capturing a wide variety of information about an asset quickly and easily. Dash automatically adds tags to assets based on the image contents, but you'll often have your own organisation-specific information you want to capture too.
By default, Dash comes set up with a "Tags" field, that any user with edit permissions can use to add new tags to an asset, alongside any auto-tags that have been added.
You might want to control what tags can be used. This can be useful if:
You don't want users adding new tags and instead you want them to only be able to choose from a set list of tags
You want to create a hierarchy of tags to increase searchability (e.g. so if someone searches for "water", they will see results that include tags of "lake")
You want users to be able to browse through a list of predefined tags
If this is you, Controlled Tags are your answer.
Setting up controlled tags
You can find Controlled tags as an field type.
Go to Admin > Fields, click "New Field", and choose "Controlled tags" from the drop-down menu and click Save:
Next you should start adding tags that will be available to your users. Click "Start adding tags" in your new tags field setting pane. Here you can start adding tags.
Creating a hierarchy of tags
Once you've added tags to a controlled tags field, you can hover your mouse to the right of the tag in the settings pane and click the "Add child tags..." button to add child tags.
Tagging assets using controlled tags
Once you've got your controlled tags field created, the next thing to do is to tag some assets! You can tag assets with any controlled tag, either the parent or the child tags.
Simply open the asset, locate the new controlled tags field in the fields sidebar, and you can then:
Type in an existing tag to apply it
Click to browse existing controlled tags visually and select them to add them
Add a new controlled tag (Contributor or Admins only)
Using controlled tags to find assets
Type a tag into the search bar
Simply type a controlled tag into the search bar just like any other search term and Dash will return all matching assets. An asset tagged with a child tag will be returned when searching for either the child or the parent tag.
Type a tag into the filters pane
Open the filters side panel and type the tags you would like to filter for
Browse existing controlled tags
From the filters side panel, click the Browse Tags icon next to the text entry box, and you'll be able to visually browse all assets. Select the ones you would like to filter by and press Apply.
💡 Top tip - when browsing a large list of controlled tags, pressing a letter on the keyboard will take you straight to that section of the tags.
FAQs
What is the difference between tags and controlled tags?
Tags | Controlled tags |
Can be created by any contributor from the asset details view | Can only be created by admins |
Are a flat list of tags | Can be structured into a hierarchy |
Users can't browse existing tags | Users can browse and select from existing tags |
Can I only use controlled tags in my Dash account?
Yes! You can delete the existing Tags field and just use your new controlled tag field.
Can auto-tagging populate controlled tags?
Yes! Simply go to Admin > Intelligence and choose your controlled tag field in the "Auto-tagging for images" section.