How to Use Tags and Tag Groups to Classify Your Objects Intelligently

A description is what an object looks like. A tag is what an object is. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

When a family sits down to catalogue a hundred pieces of furniture, jewellery, and art, the temptation is to write everything important into the description field. "Armchair in the living room, belonged to Marie, bought in Italy in the 1970s, needs reupholstering." That sentence contains four facts — location, provenance, origin, condition — buried in a text block that no system will ever successfully parse. The family cannot filter by it, cannot sort by it, and cannot build a smart album out of it.

Tags pull those facts out of prose and into structured, searchable fields. Tag groups keep those tags organised. Together they are the infrastructure that makes a family catalogue actually useful — not just to the person who built it, but to every heir who opens it in ten years.

This is the first article in Heriteo's How to series — practical guides to the specific features that make the difference between a catalogue and a heritage.

What a tag group is, and why it matters

In Heriteo, every tag belongs to a group. A group is a named, colour-coded dimension of classification. "Gift from Marie" and "Inherited" both belong to the same group: Provenance. "Furniture" and "Jewellery" both belong to Category. "To photograph" and "To restore" both belong to Action.

The group is not just a folder. It is a contract. When a family decides that Provenance answers the question "where did this object come from?", every tag in that group must answer the same question — or it doesn't belong there. That discipline is what keeps a tag system from drifting into noise over time.

Without groups, a catalogue of two hundred objects typically accumulates sixty or seventy tags — some of which mean the same thing, some applied differently by different family members, most of which were never used consistently. Groups prevent that drift by giving every tag a defined place and a defined purpose.

The three groups every family needs first

Start with three. Resist the urge to design the perfect system on day one — it will change once you start applying it to real objects. These three groups answer the three questions a family asks most often:

1. Provenance — Where did this come from?

Example tags: "Inherited," "Bought," "Gift from Marie," "Gift from Pierre," "Family workshop," "Estate of grandmother."

Provenance is the group that connects objects to people. It is also the group that ages the least well — once the person is gone, "Gift from Marie" becomes the only way a future heir knows that the armchair is connected to her at all. Apply provenance tags early and apply them to everything.

2. Category — What kind of object is it?

Example tags: "Furniture," "Jewellery," "Art," "Book," "Textile," "Ceramic," "Silver," "Watch," "Document."

Category answers the "what" question. It is the group you'll use when an heir asks "how much jewellery does the household have?" or when an appraiser asks for a breakdown by type. Keep this group flat and broad — subcategories can wait until you have five hundred objects. One well-chosen category tag per object is far better than three inconsistently applied ones.

3. Action — What does this object still need?

Example tags: "To photograph," "To appraise," "To restore," "Do not separate," "Insurance priority," "Fragile."

Action tags capture the outstanding cataloguing and maintenance work attached to an object. They are distinct from the formal heir decisions (who receives, sells, or donates an object) — those live in Heriteo's Decisions workflow. Action tags are about what the object needs before the family is ready to make those choices. A smart album built on "To appraise" is a valuation queue; one built on "To restore" is a maintenance list. Keep action tags specific and retire them once the work is done.

How to name tags that actually get used

A tag that is hard to find will not be applied. A tag that is ambiguous will be applied differently by different family members. A tag that is too broad will be applied to everything — and therefore filter nothing.

Three rules keep tag naming practical:

• Name tags as phrases, not keywords. "Gift from Marie" is a tag. "Marie" is not — it could mean anything. "Inherited" is a tag. "Old" is not — it means nothing specific. The extra words are the definition.
• One tag per real-world concept. If "Inherited" and "Family heirloom" mean the same thing in your household, pick one and delete the other. Tag systems collapse under synonym sprawl faster than under any other failure mode.
• If you can't decide which group a tag belongs to, rethink the tag. A tag that could plausibly live in Provenance or Action is probably two tags: "Gift from Marie" (Provenance) and "To appraise" (Action). When a tag is doing double duty, it is usually hiding two distinct facts.

Colour-coding: not decoration, but disambiguation

Heriteo lets you assign a colour to each tag group. This is not a cosmetic feature.

An object with tags from three groups — one Provenance tag, two Category tags, one Action tag — looks very different depending on whether the groups are colour-coded. Without colour, you read four tags and try to understand how they relate. With colour, you see at a glance: one orange tag (where it came from), two blue tags (what it is), one green tag (what we're doing with it). The cognitive load of reading the object drops to almost nothing.

Assign colours that are visually distinct from each other. Use the same colours consistently across the whole catalogue. Don't change them — a family that has been working with an orange Provenance group for a year will be confused if Provenance is suddenly purple.

Tags vs rooms vs condition — what goes where

A common mistake is to use tags for facts that have their own dedicated fields in Heriteo. "In the living room" is not a tag — it is a room assignment. "Fair condition" is not a tag — it is a condition grade. "Worth around €800" is not a tag — it is an estimation.

Tags are for facts that don't have a dedicated field and that you want to filter on. If Heriteo already offers a structured field for a piece of data, use the field. Tags should cover the residual dimensions: provenance, category, and the concepts specific to your family that no generic system could anticipate.

If you find yourself reaching for a tag to record something that should be a field, check whether Heriteo already has the field you need. We covered all seven structured fields in our piece on turning an object into heritage.

Where the work pays off

A well-maintained tag system has three places where it returns its investment:

Smart albums. Every dynamic album in Heriteo is a saved tag query. A "Gift from Marie" tag applied consistently to forty objects creates an "Everything from Marie" album with no extra work. We covered the full smart album logic in how smart albums work — the short version is that the album is only as reliable as the tags it queries.

Object review and filtering. The admin heir's object review page can be filtered by tag, room, condition, and estimation. A filter for "To appraise" objects in Excellent condition is a quick valuation queue. A filter for "Inherited" objects with no heir intention recorded is a follow-up list. None of those filters work without a consistent tag system underneath.

Heir understanding. When an heir opens an object tagged "Gift from Marie," they know something a description never quite conveys: that this object has a human origin, a connection to someone who mattered. Tags carry meaning efficiently, and they carry it legibly — for a heir reading a list on a small screen, a colour-coded tag is often what they see first.

Tag sprawl: the failure mode to watch for

Tag sprawl develops slowly. A new tag is created for each new type of object. Slightly different tags are used for the same concept by different family members. Old tags are never retired. Within a year, a system that started with fifteen tags has eighty, most applied to fewer than three objects each.

Two practices prevent sprawl. First, when a new family member starts cataloguing, give them the existing tag list before they create any new tags. Second, run a tag audit every six months: look for synonyms, merge duplicates, and retire any tag that is not earning its keep. The audit takes thirty minutes and saves hours of confused filtering over the following year.

The second common mistake is under-tagging: cataloguing an object with a photo and a price but no tags, on the assumption that the description is enough. A description answers "what is this?" A tag answers "how does this connect to everything else?" One without the other is a dead end at search time.

A tag system with no structure is noise. A tag system built around three honest groups — where it came from, what it is, what it still needs — is the infrastructure that makes everything else in Heriteo work. Smart albums, heir decisions, estate planning: they all run on the tag layer underneath. Spend an hour designing yours. The catalogue will repay it many times over.