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Forum Discussion
Please overhaul the capabilities of tags
I see that this has been brought up multiple deferent times and for some reason the ideas seem to be closed out relatively quickly without much explanation. In general it seems like the use of tags in Dropbox is really lacking, something that seems like a pretty simple idea, and a feature that has been around for almost 40 years on other parts of the internet/software...
The first major issue that I have run into with tags as a dropbox business account owner as well as for my personal accounts is how isolated the use of tags is to the website. You cant edit tags in any way from the mobile apps, and you cant even search by tags in the desktop app. If we have a folder filled with lots of project files, the only way to organize them is by putting them into subfolders, however this is not helpful if your files apply to multiple subfolders like ours often do. In this case we have to have duplicates of files in different subfolders. This obviously causes a problem because if one of these duplicates gets edited the others are now outdated and have to be separately updated as well. This could be solved by adding tags to the files, and being able to search the main project folder by these tags, however this is only currently possible from the dropbox website. The website is the least common way that we ever access dropbox, so that makes this approach obsolete.
In addition its hard to apply tags to photos, since once you are viewing the photo on the website viewer, the column to add tags disappears, and you have to click back out of the photo view to place your tags.
The final issue that i run into with tags is for shared folders. When we share a project folder with our clients, who are not dropbox users, they have zero ability to search the folder by tags even though they are accessing dropbox through the website...
It all seems simple to solve, can someone from dropbox follow up to let me know if overhauling tags is even being considered, or if not, what makes it so unachievable?
Ironically when posting this idea, the forum is asking me to select tags to apply to my post, so clearly your team understands the power of useful tagging...
Thank you for your time,
Aaron
- Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Hey AT193, thanks for reaching out to the Dropbox Community.
We really appreciate your feedback on our tagging feature and I will make sure to pass all your comments along to our team.
In the meantime, I understand that creating duplicates of the same files is a hassle, so perhaps you can use shortcuts to link the files in multiple locations instead.
I hope this helps, but let me know if you have any questions.
- Hi Hannah
Thank you for looking into the tags issue. As far as shortcuts go, I can't seem to find how to create shortcuts in the desktop Dropbox or even in the mobile app, can you explain further or provide a link to a tutorial?
Thanks
Aaron
- Hannah
Hey Aaron, not a problem!
it's not something you can do through Dropbox, actually, it's something you can do through your OS, so you should be able to find the steps online. 🙂
