Video tagging best practices

January 1, 2020 - Doug Sillars in Video update

Adding tags is a great way to simplify searches in your video collection - you can simply search for a specific tag to show all of the videos.

Adding tags is easy, but there are a few tricks you should be aware of. For example this video has the tag "captions":

   "videoId": "vi5UNyaStzuuj0xTAGp7qtjf",
    "title": "Elephant's Dream",
    "description": "",
    "public": true,
    "panoramic": false,
    "mp4Support": true,
    "publishedAt": "2020-03-05T19:26:21+00:00",
    "updatedAt": "2020-03-11T08:23:04+00:00",
    "tags": [
        "captions"
    ],

If I want to add a tag "dialogue", I cannot simply Update the Video with a new caption. The PATCH command will rewrite the "tag" entry.

You can see more about available tagging commands in the API reference documentation:

Best practice

Show the Video to receive a JSON similar to the snippet above. Collect any existing tags, append the new tag, and then update the video:

curl -X PATCH https://ws.api.video/videos/vi5UNyaStzuuj0xTAGp7qtjf  -H 'Authorization: Bearer {access_token}}'   -d '{   "tags":["captions", "dialogue"] }'

and you'll have the correct tags on the video:

  "title": "Elephant's Dream",
    "description": "",
    "public": true,
    "panoramic": false,
    "mp4Support": true,
    "publishedAt": "2020-03-05T19:26:21+00:00",
    "updatedAt": "2020-03-12T21:06:21+00:00",
    "tags": [
        "captions",
        "dialogue"
    ],

Example of tags in action

upload.a.video/toDiscord is an uploader that tags each video with 'Discord' We then have a way to see all te videos in our collection that have been posted to Discord channels.