How can I share labels across boards?

[atlasstrom]

I would like to share labels across some boards and be able to search and filter across boards by those labels (tags). Is this possible? And if so, how?

[Mekatronik]

@Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows I think is very weird that this hasn't been addressed by Atlassian a long time ago since this has been something that has been bugging user for year. Of course it should be so that you could make labels as a part of the Workspace and control how and who can edit them and that boards they should be part of. I say of course because labels are such a vital way of filtering and working with your cards. I've had so many issues with this. The worst is if someone copied a card from other board containing similar labels, e.g. I have made a label called "Very Important" that me teammates use if they want me to look at a matter ASAP.  Then someone copiers and pasts in a card with a label called "Important" fro somewhere else. Now some of my teammates start using this new label. I then filter by by "Very Important" and not "Important" which I don't even know about until someone calls me and asks why I am not addressing there Important stuff.

Why isn't there a setting the Workspace Settings, allow or not allow copy of labels between boards?

One more feature I have been waiting for year is to be able to filter after "Custom Fields". Custom Fields seems to be a great tool but I don't use it only because of this. Same with them, they need to be made for the workspace and user controlled, who can alter them and on that boards they should be used.  

It can be very frustrating to have to use all kinds of workarounds for this and that when things could be fixed easily by the creators.

Regards,

One very happy but frustrated customer.

[christopherassaf]

I agree wholeheartedly. I just started using Trello yesterday, and this is already a stumbling block. It should be quick and easy to do.

[Peter Van Ryder]

I was struggling with this as well.  I'm surprised that there isn't at least an import/export feature or a Butler feature.  But I did find a great workaround on a post from 2018 (and they still haven't done anything with it).

Create a Card on the board with the "Labels" created the way you want.  Assign all Labels to the Card.  Then simply Copy or Move the Card between the Boards that you would like to have the same Labels.  Presto Chango........the Labels are there!

Unfortunately, you will need to repeat the process if you ever change or edit the labels, but at least it's something.

[Silvia]

Hi @atlasstrom and welcome! As Hannah mentioned, as long as the label name is the same across multiple boards, your label search will pull cards from all boards it can be found on. You also mentioned filtering which is why I wanted to introduce the Quick Lists from our power-up Blue Cat Reports. It has powerful filtering options as you can see in the screenshot I took:

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

Hi @atlasstrom ! Welcome to the community :) are you able to clarify a bit more around "sharing labels"? Labels exist at the board level, but you can create the same label across many boards. For example, you could have a label titled "Apple" on board A and board B - when searching across all boards, you can use the label search operator "label:Apple" and this would pull both cards with the "Apple" label on boards A and B.

[atlasstrom]

Understood, but I’m looking to create a list of shared labels. What you’re describing -  the labels aren’t shared, so you need to make separate lists/ new labels per board. The search will go across all boards but Im looking for one set of labels applied to different boards. 

Here if you create the label Apple on one board, on the other board when you type A, Apple would appear as a suggestion because it was already added. If you edited the Apple label on the first board, it would be reflected on the second. What you’re describing you need to type and add Apple again creating a separate list, and if you edited it, it would not reflect on the second board  meaning the labels are not shared. Do you know if it is possible to create a shared list of labels, aka tags across boards?

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@atlasstrom as mentioned above, labels in Trello exist at the board level. Most things are applied at that same level - lists, custom fields, power ups, etc. It's not like Jira where those things exist at the "instance" level. There's no way around it seeing as it's just the way Trello has been designed. 

[Ivo Lapa]

"There's no way around it seeing as it's just the way Trello has been designed." really is a let down and pushes users to seach for other platforms.

Changing labels in 50 project boards becames a scalability problem for users like me and exposes Trello's fragilities in interoperability between boards.

[IanVL]

Come on now... If Butler can move cards between boards, there must be some way to add/update labels across boards...

[christopherassaf]

And a way to make a label group separator for searches across boards.