Improved tag management in SketchUp Shop and SketchUp for Schools

A few months ago, we introduced improved tag management in SketchUp Pro 2021. Today, we’re bringing those updates to SketchUp Shop and SketchUp for Schools.

Tags are a great way to organize a model, but managing long lists of tags can be cumbersome. Tag Folders — now available to Shop subscribers and SketchUp for Schools user — allow you to organize your tags for quicker scanning, access, and bulk visibility control. You’ll now be able to control the visibility of all tags in a folder at once, or select multiple tags or folders at once to control the visibility of tagged items in your model.

For Shop and Schools users, we’ve also added the ability to apply various dashed line patterns to tagged geometry. These dash patterns can help you to define property boundaries, illustrate project fabrication instructions or identify elements to be demolished in a model of an existing structure.

Improving tag management also gave us the opportunity to reconsider some elements of the tags workflow that have been confusing to SketchUp for Web users in the past. One of the changes you’ll notice in the new interface for SketchUp Shop, Free and Schools is the absence of the “Untagged” tag (previously known as Layer 0) along with the notion of assigning an “active tag/layer”. All new geometry or objects you create will be “untagged” by default, until you decide to tag them. To see all Untagged objects, you can simply turn off the visibility of all tags and folders using the new “Master Visibility” toggle.

For longtime users, this change may take a bit of getting used to. However, we believe this workflow will be more straightforward to learn and use overall. For example, you’ll no longer have to worry about undoing a bunch of work because you unknowingly added geometry to a tag you forgot was active. In fact, you’ll be able to better manage your tags workflow because we’ve added a new inline ‘assign tag’ option that offers you the ability to assign a tag to preselected items without having to flip over into the Entity Info Panel.

Beyond these changes, you’ll find other go-to tags features — filtering tags, coloring by tag, sorting tags by name or visibility (this is a new option, too!) — consolidated at the top of the Tags panel.

6 Likes

Hi, I don’t understand the changes to the tags for sketchup for web users.
It says that it improves the workflow by making you individualy select the things you draw and assign a tag to it AFTER you draw them.
doesn’t that take more mouse klicks than, selecting the layer you want to draw in before you draw it?
Autocad, vectorworks,… they all work with this principle, why change this workflow when most people are used to this way of drawing?
Is this a case of reinventing the wheel?

@Gopal this thread shows a good example of how the changes to tags has screwed up many older models. Admittedly the problem may well be that they were using tags incorrectly, but the new system doesn’t allow them to fix their errors.

2 Likes