When deciding how to organise your Dash assets, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. Every account is unique and will have its own specific set of needs. That being said, we can still give you some general guiding principles to help you on your way.

The key to effectively organising your Dash account is learning when is the right time to use folders or fields. Here's a top-level explanation of the difference between the two:

When categorising assets, should you place them into a folder, or add the category as a field? Let's look at our Planto Dash to explore some best practices.

In our Dash account for our fictional plant brand, Planto, we've created the following folders:

These are based on a number of principles, detailed below.

You'll want to group your assets into folders depending on what they're going to be used for. This will make them easier to find and also will make most sense for your users when looking for an asset. For example, you may want to have a folder specifically for "Product and Lifestyle" images (which'll be used for marketing and PR purposes) separate to your "Sales campaigns" folder (which will be for retailers) because these'll be used for different purposes and by different people.

It's also worth mentioning our guest upload feature, where you'll need to select a specific folder for users to upload into, which helps keep it separate from your own content. Here, we've created a folder for users to upload to for a photo competition:

👓 Permissions

Related to the above, the great thing about folders is you can control the visibility of the assets in those folders on a user-specific basis. For example, you may not want retailers using your "Sales Campaigns" folders to have access to the "Products and Lifestyle" or "UGC" (User Generated Content) folder. By setting the right permissions, you can have it so that retailers will only see the "Sales campaigns" folder when they sign in.

To take another example, you may have photographers using your Dash. You could give them "Basic" access (i.e., View only) to the UGC folder, for some photo inspiration, but give them "Contributor" access to the Products & Lifestyle folder, where they can actually upload their photos to.

Folders are also key when configuring portals, our self-serve feature for non-Dash users to explore your assets. When creating a portal, you can select whether you want end users to see all folders, or only specific ones:

When are folders not the best option?

The most obvious way to organise your assets is by using folders, and this is a great start. The power of Dash, however, comes from making your digital assets (e.g. photography, brand collateral, product videos, documents), more searchable. The easier it is to find the asset you need, the more time you save and the faster you can then use it in your workflows.

Let's say we have dozens of assets containing plants across our folders. Now, we want to be able to quickly categorise all these assets by plant name, so that we can find the right plant when we want. Our first instinct might be to put each asset into a relevant sub-folder. So, we'd go into our Products & Lifestyle folder, and split this by plant name:

Imagine you wanted to only see a certain plant within a different folder. To do that, we'd have to repeat the above across all our other folders, and our sub-folders, such as the "Influencer content" sub-folder here:

As you can probably tell, this is not the best way to organise our assets in this scenario.

👎 It's labour intensive - You'll have to create a new group of sub-folders with each plant name for every folder you have, and any new folders you create in future.
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👎 It's visually cluttered

As you can see in the example above, expanding all the sub-folders takes up a lot of screen space and will make the side bar harder to navigate.

👎 It reduces searchability

This is where fields come in. By attaching a piece of information to a specific asset, rather than siloing an asset in a specific location, we make it more searchable and reduce unnecessary clutter in our account.

Instead of folders, then, we're going to create a field for our plant names. In this instance, we might like to create a Controlled Tags field (good for long lists of attributes), with a different tag for each plant name.

You only have to do this once, and this is now a searchable piece of information attached to your asset. So, if I want to find all images in my account containing a ZZ plant, I just have to click the "Plant name" tag in my filters, select ZZ plant, and this brings back all assets containing a ZZ plant tag, no matter what folder they're in.

If I did want to only search for this tag within specific folders, I can select the required folder(s) in my filters and it'll only search within those.

I can also combine this field with other fields I've created, for example I could search for all assets containing a hanging & trailing plant, that are approved for social media use and are in portrait mode:

For more information on the different types of custom fields available, read this article.

Fields, then, have the following advantages:
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✅ Time saving - you only have to create a field once and you can use it across multiple folders. You also won't be spending ages trying to find a specific asset because you can't remember which folder/sub-folder you put it in.

✅ Your assets are more searchable - You can easily combine multiple categories and do very specific searches if you need to.

✅ Your Dash is less cluttered - Your Dash will look better, and you won't be drowning in endless branches of folders/sub-folders.

How do you decide, then, the best time to use a folder or a field?