Understanding taxonomy

A keyword is a tag applied to an asset, such as "Christmas". A category is a named group of related keywords, such as "Season", "Brand", or "Year". Taxonomy is the whole system of categories and keywords across the platform.

The administration screens use a more technical term for a category. In the Taxonomy administration screens a category is called a genus (plural genera), while the asset-editing panel calls the same thing a category. The two terms mean the same thing.

Keywords sit within categories, and an asset can carry keywords from several categories at once. For example, one image might be tagged "Christmas" from the Season category, "Brand A" from the Brand category, and "2026" from the Year category.

This is what makes taxonomy more flexible than folders. An asset lives in one place, but it can hold many keywords, so people can find it from several angles: by season, by brand, or by year.

Taxonomy is the backbone behind several features.

Filtering and search on the front end lets end users narrow the asset library by selecting keywords, or by typing a term and choosing from the suggested keywords. See Find and filter assets.

Lenses use keyword conditions to define which assets appear on a particular portal page, so taxonomy determines what a curated page shows.

AI smart tagging applies keywords automatically, matched to your taxonomy rather than a generic set, so the tags reflect your own categories. See Understanding operational AI and Tag and edit asset metadata.

Because so much depends on taxonomy, its quality shapes how precisely people can find and curate assets. A well-structured set of categories and keywords lets users filter cleanly, while a sparse or inconsistent one limits how far they can narrow results.

Changes to keywords ripple across the platform. Renaming a keyword updates it on every asset it is applied to, so an asset tagged "Blue" immediately shows "Dark Blue" everywhere. Deleting a keyword removes it from every asset, with no archive or soft delete, so lenses that relied on that keyword may return fewer results or none.

Taxonomy is also scoped to a domain. Keywords created in a parent domain are visible in its child domains, but keywords created in a child domain are visible only within that child. For a single-domain setup this has no practical effect; it matters mainly where an organisation uses subdomains.