If your site is any larger than a few pages and/or you've been very active adding or using existing media, it's quite likely you've found your Media Library content to be growing at a quick pace. It's never a bad idea to consider how your images and files are organized, and you can do that through Taxonomy—before, during, and after you've added them to your site.

Category terms

You can add terms on the fly as you upload your media, but in this scenario where you may never have considered adding a category when you uploaded a new image (if it's a recent addition since Media Library was added) or gone back and done so to existing images, it's a very easy step to make a defined category list available for your library to use.

Creating your categories

1. Navigate to your admin panel's Shortcuts » Taxonomy and locate the Media Categories entry on the page, then click its corresponding List terms button.
2. If you haven't worked in this space before, the Media Categories list will be empty. You can change that by clicking on the +Add Term button to begin creating media-related terms.
3. Provide the term name in the Name field. You can provide any additional information you might need in the other fields provided, but the Name field is the only one required for this process.
4. Scroll to the bottom and click the Save button to finish.

Assign one or more categories to your media

Once you've created your list of terms, you can begin assigning them. These terms are available to all of your media, including document, audio, and video files.

1. Navigate to your media library by using Shortcuts » Media or Shortcuts » All content » Media tab.
2. Locate the media file you want to work with and click its Edit button while in Table view or the Pen icon while in Grid view.
3. A section titled Category will be available for your term. You can click one or more of the terms to assign them. To assign two or more, hold down your Ctrl or Command button and click each term you want to apply.
4. Scroll to the bottom and click Save to finish.

Filtering for your Category

The current Search/Filter option in your media library dashboard requires you to know the terms you've used in your Media vocabulary (we hope to change this in a future update to the Media dashboard view). Type in the term in the Category field and click the Apply Filters button to see the filtered results.

Bulk term assignment?

Unfortunately, no; there is no process currently available to allow you to assign a term to multiple pieces of media at once.