The longer you use Services, the more files you have to manage. And if you have a lot of files for each song, like chord charts, lead sheets, and audio files for each instrument or vocal part, it’s not just hard for you to stay organized, it’s hard for your team members to find the files meant for them.
Well it’s your lucky day, because we’ve got two new fantastic features for file facilitation! First up, File Tags are a way for you to categorize and then filter your files, similar to all the other types of tags in Services. Second, Limited File Visibility lets you use those tags to hide the files that don’t pertain to each team member.
If you’re a power-user, you might be thinking, “This sounds a lot like the existing Attachment Types feature.” Well, you thought right! Attachment Types has always been somewhat confusing, so we’re splitting it up and rebranding it into two more-powerful features that also decrease complexity — win, win!
File Tags
The Files Page already showed you all the files in your account, and let you filter them by their metadata. Now you can take that a big step further by creating as many file tags as you want, and use those to make finding files even easier.
File Tags can now be grouped for deeper organization, and moved between groups. There’s also a built-in group for “Lyrics & Chords” that has special tags for each type of file you can create in Planning Center. You can assign your own uploaded files to those types once they are enabled, and you can create your own custom tags within that group, too.
Permissions
Like all other tags, file tags can be managed by users whose top-level General Permission is Administrator. The old Attachment Types feature was only available to Organization Administrators, so this opens it up to a few more people and doesn’t require someone to be an Administrator for your entire organization just to manage file tags.
Auto-Assigning File Tags
All file tags have a setting to auto-assign when the filename contains any words of your choosing. That way when you upload a file, it can be tagged automatically based on its name. The built-in tags for Chord Charts and Capo Charts have extra features.
Chord Charts have an additional unless section so that you can automatically exclude capo charts. Conversely, if you add Capo Chart to a position’s file visibility (see below), when there is no capo file for a song, that position will see the regular chord chart even if it’s not assigned to that position normally.
Transfer from Attachment Types
If you were already using Attachment Types, we didn’t want these new built-in options just appearing unexpectedly, so we’ve disabled them by default. When you’re ready to use them, enable the ones you want. Then go to any old tags/types, edit them, and click the transfer button.
Any files or positions linked to your old type/tag will be transferred to the new one you choose, and then the old one will be removed. Easy!
Limited File Visibility
If you attach many files to each song, it might be difficult for team members to know which files are for them. When they use the media player, it can be annoying to frequently have to skip over files they never care about. Limited File Visibility allows you to hide files people don’t need so they only see the ones they care about.
First, for any Service Type you want to start hiding files, enable Limited File Visibility from its settings. Then for each applicable team, edit each position and set which files should be visible based on their file tags.
Scheduled Viewers will only see untagged files or files with the tags you set. Viewers and higher will still see all other files, but they’ll be grayed out and skipped in the Media Player.
Once again, if you were previously familiar with Attachment Types, this functions exactly the same way, it’s just been rebranded to make it more discoverable and easier to understand.
To start organizing your files, click the Songs tab, and then choose Manage Files from the gear menu at the top right. To limit file visibility, start by editing the settings of a Service Type, enable Limited File Visibility, and click the Configure button which will walk you through it with ease.