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Portals: create a public-facing view of your Dash

Learn about using Portals to share your assets with non-Dash users

Updated over a week ago

Portals let you create a permanent, public and searchable view of selected folders from your Dash account. They're a powerful way of sharing assets with your partners, retailers, distributors, press etc, and letting them find the assets they need without having to ask you to do it for them!


Overview of portals

What are the benefits of using a portal?

  • Make one or more folders publicly available via a public and shareable URL.

  • You decide exactly how portal visitors can interact with your assets.

  • You can add a welcome message so visitors understand what they are looking at.

  • Access all the same search and filter options that your normal Dash users get.

  • Customise the theme of each portal, to give a personalised experience to your external partners.

  • You can create multiple portals, each one dedicated to your particular business needs!

What access can be controlled from portals?

Your portal, your rules:

  • Control exactly what fields are visible to your portal visitors. Learn how to do this here.

  • Add a passcode to your portals to have full control of who can access them.

  • You can set which folder(s) can be searchable from the portal.

  • Control the level of access your portal visitors have: to either "view only" or "view and download".

What is the experience like for my portal visitors?

  • The same browsing experience as your Dash users (e.g. searching and filtering) only for the folders allowed in the portal they are accessing.

  • If the portal user-access is set to "view and download": they can download any asset included in the portal, and use any of the preset sizes available in your account.

  • They will also have access to our in-app messenger to enable them to search our Help Center and contact Dash support if needed.

What can portal visitors not do?

Your portal visitors won't be able to:

  • Create share links or collections to share your assets outside of your Portal.

  • Generate embeddable links to assets.

  • Create saved searches.

How do portals differ from a shared collection?

See our sharing overview page for a comparison of the various methods of sharing in Dash.


How to create a portal

  1. Go To Admin > Portals and click Create a portal

  2. Give your portal a name

  3. Choose the folders that you would like to give access to

  4. Enter a Welcome message and choose whether you'd like to include the 'Recently added' feed on your portal home screen

  5. Choose whether to make the portal public or protected with a passcode

  6. Customise the theme of your portal or inherit the main theme of your Dash

  7. To finish, click Create portal

And that's it! You can now share this portal with anyone externally. If you need to access the URL, you can click the Share button again.

How to delete a portal

If you want to prevent a portal from being accessed, you can delete it. Simply return to Admin > Portals, locate the portal you want to delete and click the 'Remove' button.

❗️Deleting a portal is irreversible - if you want to share this portal again you will need to recreate it.

How to edit a portal

You can easily make changes to an existing portal: such as its name, the folders it shares, and all the other settings available when you create a portal, including its theme.

Navigate to Admin > portals and click on the desired portal to open the Portal's Settings panel. You can also use the search bar to search for the desired portal quicker by name.

Customising a portal's theme

Your portal can inherit your Dash's current global theme, or you can give your clients and partners a personalised experience with a unique theme!

The theme can be set up from the moment you are creating the portal. The aspects that can be customised in the portal's interface are:

  • Accent colour

  • Logo

  • Browser favicon - i.e. the icon displayed in your browser's tab

  • Home page background

  • Login page background (if a passcode is used)

  • Whether to include the "Recently added" feed

You can also edit your portal's theme, or reset it your company's global Dash theme at any time. Go to Admin > Portals, click on the portal you need changing, and scroll down to the "Theming" section:

For more assistance regarding theming, please refer to our general theming article here, which applies to both your internal Dash and your portals.


Frequently asked questions about portals

Can I control what fields are visible to portal visitors?

You can show or hide custom fields in portals using the "Hidden from public" checkbox found within the field settings in Admin > Fields. Learn more in this article.

How can I show sub-folders on the portal home page?

Generally, the parent folders are always shown on the home screen and you can't switch to showing sub-folders.

There is one scenario where sub-folders are shown, and that is if you have manually selected only sub-folders within a single parent folder to be shown in the portal.

Can I add a clickable URL to the Welcome message?

Yes, you can add a clickable URL using HTML code in the Welcome message. Just add the following:

<a href="https://google.com">Click here to go to Google</a>

This will then result in text that looks like this:

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