Hopefully you've realised one of the strengths of Dash is its ability to make finding your assets faster, and a key way of enabling this is by using custom fields.

If you'd like an example of how this helps, see this article.

To create a new custom field, visit Admin > Fields and click "Add new"

Now you are sold on the benefits of using custom fields, let's take a look at the various options available to you.

This is a single-line free text field. An example is the Asset Title you'll already see in your Dash:

This is a multi-line free text field that accepts carriage returns. Useful for notes, additional copy, video scripts or any other longer-form information you might want to store. Already used in your Dash account in the "Description" field:

Tags is a group of individual words that you can add to increase the searchability of your assets. These are useful to store less formal information about images that doesn't need to be formally placed within its own custom field, and to allow users to just type in data they think will be useful to store.

Tags can also be used to store specific data that you'd have a lot of variations of, such as an SKU number. (Because having a long list of SKU numbers in a drop-down list might not be user-friendly due to the possible length of list).

Tags can also be the home for Dash's auto-tagging feature, where Dash will use machine learning to identify things in an image and add these as tags automatically.

Controlled tags are similar to tags but with a few key differences:

Controlled tags are useful when you have a lot of data to store, and want to ensure it is always entered correctly. For example, free tags could be entered with a spelling mistake.

If I selected the following tags in my "Scenery" controlled tags field:

This gives you a hierarchy of tags applied against the asset like this:

If a user searched for a parent tag such as "water", they'd see assets tagged with "water" as well as assets tagged with any of that tag's child tags. If a user only searches for the tag "ocean" then they will only see assets with that tag.

A dropdown list can be used to allow a user to select a single option from a list. This is appropriate if only one of the options could apply to an asset at any one time.

💡 Dropdowns appear as checklists in the filter bar to support OR logic while filtering. Read more here.

A checklist is similar to a Dropdown in that it provides a list of data to choose between, but with a checklist a user can select multiple items from the list. This is appropriate if multiple options from the list could apply to an asset at the same time.

A nested list is essentially another folder field. It acts identically to the built-in Folders field you have already got in your Dash account. This is useful when you want to navigate a visual hierarchy of information.

A nested list operates fairly similarly to the controlled tags field, it just presents differently in the filters pane. You may want to experiment with each and find which one suits you.

This is a typical date selection field, that lets you record a date against an asset.

The same as a date picker but with the option to add a time as well

This is a date picker field that has some special behaviours, namely the sending of emails to admins when the date is expired and the displaying of a warning message on the asset when the asset has expired.

Learn more about using expiry dates in this article.