How to use Collections in Wagtail

Hey y'all, I learned about a Wagtail feature today for managing images and documents that I wish I had known about a year ago. And that feature is collections. Doesn't sound all that interesting, but trust me, when you're managing like thousands of images and documents, collections will become your best friend. So let me just go ahead and show you how it works. Right here we have a very small image library demo here with four images in it. And so if I want to kind of organize these images into collections, what I'll do is I'll go over here to the settings area. And then I will click collections. And right now we don't have any, so let's go ahead and add some collections. I'm gonna go ahead and name one animals.

Okay, let's spell that right. And I'm going to set that underneath the root collection. And the root collection is the default collection in Wagtail. That is the collection that has all your images, all your documents, all your media, everything lives. In the root collection. Alright, so I'm gonna create the animals collection and I'm gonna go ahead and since like not every picture is of animals, I'm gonna create a people collection too. And I'm also gonna nest that under the root collection. Great. Alright, now that I have these, I'm gonna go back to images and there are a few different ways to add images to your collections. One way is to open up the image itself And this is a picture of my colleague and friend Tebow.

And I question his humanity all the time, uh, based on the number of hours he works. But he's still definitely a person. So let's go ahead and add him to the people collection right here. And I'm gonna go ahead and categorize the rest of these images as animals, but rather than opening up the individual ones, I'm gonna go ahead and just check them all here. And then we have an option right down here at the bottom to click a button that says add to collection. And I can just go ahead and add them all to the animals collection, just like that. So simple. And now that they're in collections and I have this image library open, if I want to kind of drill down according to collections, I can go over here.

to our filters area where I can sort our images according to collections. So if I go to animals, we have all the animals. And if I go to people Then we have our people collection right there. It is so so useful on that front. Now one key thing you need to know is that each image can only be a part of one collection. That is a limitation. So, you know, if you wanted to kind of uh organize things a bit more deeply, um you can, let me go ahead and show you, nest collections together. So if I wanted to create another collection that was a bit more specific

called Badgers, I could do that and then I could nest that collection under animals right here and so right there I can go back to images and let's go ahead and add our badger to that badgers collection right there. So what you'll see now though is when I like go to collection and go to animals like you know the badger image isn't there anymore because it can only be in one collection Um, so you know, I have to go to the Badgers collection if I specifically want to see the Badgers instead of all the uh animals at the top. But what I can do

Uh is instead of using nesting collections, I can use a combination of collection and tags instead So I went ahead and add uh added some individual tags here. Uh if I wanted to go to animals and add that as a collection. I can then filter down according to tags. So you know if I wanted to filter according to birds, I can now drill down animals and bird and that narrows things down. So that's one way to combine collections and tags. There are many different ways to mix and match these things. But ultimately, these are great options for organizing your images and helping you keep track of things. You can also use it on your media and your documents as well.

You can do so many other fun things with collections like add permissions to them and give certain people access, but not other people access. I'll cover some of that in future videos. Right now, just go play with these things. Like honestly, it is fun. Uh, and I'm looking forward to categorizing our image library. It's I this this makes me so happy, seriously Alright, if you want more tips and tricks about Wagtail, please sign up for our newsletter. Go to Wagtail. org slash newsletter. Would love to have you on our email list and I think that you will love what you learn here