Search and Find

Find what you’re looking for based on name and/or metadata tags.

There are two ways to find assets on creative.space without manually navigating through folders:

Search - A global search in the web app that lets you input text and returns a list of the files with matching names that you can click on to jump to them.
Libraries - A specialized interface in the web app where tagged assets within a space can be filtered in a single view using tags and/or a text input.

Search by File Name

The global search modal can be accessed by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the top menu bar of the web app. It is limited to search based on file name and does not factor in metadata at all. You do have the ability to narrow down the search to specific spaces.

Our priority when developing any features for creative.space is to never compromise storage performance. When it comes to implementing something like search for a filesystem that can be accessed and changed at any time without notice, keeping up with those changes is impossible without impacting performance. To address this issue, we integrated our search directly into the underlying Linux operating system, which is much more efficient than trying to crawl the filesystem.

The database cache will automatically refresh every few minutes, but you can click on the database icon in the search bar to trigger a refresh manually. There is a limit to how often the database can be refreshed in order to optimize performance.

Tag-Based Filtering

The Libraries interface provides an alternative view into the assets in your spaces. Instead of navigating folder structures, the viewport flattens this structure and displays all of the assets that have been tagged. In the left sidebar, all of your metadata tags are listed, categorized, and color-coded. Clicking on a tag filters the viewport to show only assets with the currently selected tags. As you click on tags, you narrow down the viewport, revealing the asset(s) you are looking for.

<aside> ⚠️ WARNING

The libraries and tagging functionality is currently limited in scope and was designed to address a specific customer use case. We plan to expand this functionality over time to streamline the tagging process to minimize manual effort required.

</aside>

Text-Based Filtering

Across multiple interfaces in both the web and desktop apps, there is support for filtering at a local level, i.e. within a specific directory or view. Rather than search across the system, these filter a list of displayed items.

There are several places where you can use this type of filtering:

Desktop App - Open any space or directory in the viewport of the desktop app and click on the magnifying glass icon to filter the items listed.
Filter Items in a Column - The Spaces, Ingest, and Snapshots interfaces in the web app include a column-based file browser.
Libraries - In addition to filtering the viewport based on tags, there is a text field for filtering. This is super helpful for applying additional tags from the viewport, since you can filter based on file extension or a prefix, suffix, or other common part of your file names, such as camera roll.

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Features

Tag and Filter

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