In the search box allow to search by the custom fields you added to the photos.
This way the custom fields would work like tags and you would be able to filter by then.
It would be a great alternative to filtering by image name, because the image names of the uploaded are usually just not meaningful (just the name that the camera gave to the file).
In the simplest implementation, it could be adding support in the search box for something like: "tag:value" and these would search by the exact text given in "value" only inside the custom fields defined.
A more advanced implementation could allow to give each custom field a shortname and then you could search in a more advanced way using something like: "tag:shortname:value" and it will return just the photos that have this specific tag.
You say you want to use it like tags. Is this a function that only you as admin need or also your participants?
The custom fields are only visible for admins.
Could you describe the use case? This will help us to better understand why you need it and will help us to find the best solution. I will then discuss this with the team.
It would be useful for both.
The idea is that you can restrict the images shown based on one of the supplied tags.
For example, let's take our use case: participants will upload photos of their Halloween pumpkins and they will indicate the classroom in the tag.
Since you will have photos of all the classrooms it will be useful both for participants (and also for admins) to show only the photos of a given classroom (for example for the classroom of your son).
I don't know if I explained very well the use case, so if you need to expand the explanation just let me know.
I will discuss this and get back to you.
We probably can't use our custom fields for this purpose, because they are not visible for the participants and only data for admins is available here. But we think about how we could solve this.
We are working on a category feature. Maybe this feature would help you here too?
You will be able to define categories and then vote in each category separately. But you probably don't want to have a separate vote per classroom, do you?
The tags to be assigned should be free to be created by the users, or do you want to specify these tags so users only can choose from your tags?
This could be quite helpful for out type of contests.
You are right, we do not need a separate vote per classroom. The split in classrooms is more a option for visualization so you can filter only the ones of a specific clasroom (usually to see the ones from your classmates).
About the usage of predefined tags I think it would be a very good idea, because when you let them write the value it is easy that they write it in different manners. For example when using custom fields we ask them the number of the classroom (there we can configure number validation) and then in a separate field the classroom letter (we suggest that they use capital letters for that, but some use lowercase). If we had predefined tags then they would have to choose from one of the available ones.
We have talked about this again and want to address this problem and implement such a feature.
Currently we are working on some other enhancements which will take some time. So you will probably have to be patient until next year.
Feature release: Tags
You find more info in our announcement Tagging content
