Is there an easy way to merge items?

AurosHarman
AurosHarman
Community Member
edited September 2020 in 1Password in the Browser

Say you have an LDAP type account, and you use your email/password pair under that account across many websites, because those different domains actually all reference the same back-end directory. You've built up a couple dozen entries for "different" sites that use that account, such that when you change the LDAP password, you have to then change the password under all those different entries.

Currently 1Pass will warn you about your "re-used" password. But it has no way, as far as I can tell, to tell it, "No, I'm not re-using it, it's really the same password." You could manually go through and copy the site identities from each alternate, but it would be nice if there were actually a "merge" process that you could start from the menus (perhaps under Item), which gets offered when duplicate password strings are detected. Launch a dialog box where the items that have the shared password are listed (or allow the user to select a set of items and launch the box). The box has three segments, with the list of items at left, the new post-merge entry at right, and details of the currently selected item in the middle. You select an item, pick one to be the "master" version that pre-populates the post-merge version, and then it automatically copies in additional entries for certain fields (websites, notes, maybe custom fields), and then you can click through the list of pre-merge entries to inspect details, and each field that hasn't already been merged has Add and Overwrite options. Then you click into the right pane and make any final changes, then hit a MERGE button at lower right to end the process, toss all the old items in the trash, and create the new one.


1Password Version: 7.6.780
Extension Version: 4.7.5.90
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

Comments

  • Hey @AurosHarman. This doesn't currently exist as a feature, but I'd be happy to share your feedback with the team. It might be nice to find a way to more elegantly handle this scenario in the first place, so you don't have to have a couple dozen logins to change. :smile:

    ref: dev/projects/customer-feature-requests#16

  • AurosHarman
    AurosHarman
    Community Member

    Yeah, I'm aware now that there's the feature where you can just edit an entry to add a site to it. It's a really great app, but it has a bit of a learning curve before you understand everything you can do with it.

    There's also the thing where when it recognizes that you've entered a password on a site it hasn't recorded yet, it offers to create an entry; if there was an obvious way in that interaction for it to also offer to add the site as a new use of an existing entry, that would be great.

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    @AurosHarman:

    if there was an obvious way in that interaction for it to also offer to add the site as a new use of an existing entry, that would be great.

    I am not sure I entirely understand what you are asking, could you please elaborate? Perhaps an example might help. Thank you!

  • AurosHarman
    AurosHarman
    Community Member

    When you log in on a site, and the system can't match the user/pass you just entered to an existing entry, it pops up this dialogue:

    So that gives you an "Add New" and an "Update Existing" -- I've always interpreted the Update Existing as aiming at overwriting an existing entry. What I'm thinking of here is having three clearer options, something like "Create New Login", "Update Existing Login" (i.e. change the user/pass for the site), "Register New Site for Existing Login" (add a new site to go with the user/pass).

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    @AurosHarman:

    Thank you for the clarification :+1:

    "Register New Site for Existing Login" (add a new site to go with the user/pass).

    Wouldn't the "Update Existing" option help with this too? If you enter your username and password on a new website, 1Password will prompt you to save your credentials. At this point, you can use the "Update Existing" option to add the new URL to the item, since the username and password would be the same.

  • AurosHarman
    AurosHarman
    Community Member

    Until pretty recently it wouldn't have occurred to me that the Update one could be used for that purpose. It might help if there were more tip popups that were turned on by default, and then you can eventually turn them off once you know the features.

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    Thank you for the feedback @AurosHarman! We will certainly continue to evaluate this as we move forward :+1:

  • AurosHarman
    AurosHarman
    Community Member
    edited September 2020

    OK I just had a practical example of this.

    The news site Business Insider, for whatever reason, directs you through a separate website, id.tinypass.com, when you're creating an account with them. However the next time you come to log in, you're at a login that's actually on a www.businessinsider.com page. I duly copied my user/pass out of the entry I'd saved earlier, and when presented with the Create / Update dialogue, I could not select Update. Because presumably it doesn't detect any entry that matches www.businessinsider.com, and thus would make sense to update with the just-entered user/pass pair. The Update tab is only allowing me to change the user/pass pair on an existing entry that matches the current website. It is not allowing me to add a website to an existing entry that matches the current user/pass pair. I guess the Update tab functionality could just be expanded. Personally I think a third tab would be better. Something like "Combine" or "Add Site". If the deal is that the Update tab only actually becomes accessible when you have a match on website, then you could just replace the Update tab with the "Add Site" tab if there is no website match, but there are user/pass matches.

  • Hey @AurosHarman. Thanks for that example and feedback. We do want to make sure we aren't providing too easy of access to data on the "wrong" sites (i.e., sites where the domains don't match), and similarly then we don't have a one-click option to add a brand-new site to an existing entry, but it's definitely something for us to think about as we work on the future of 1Password, especially for those pesky sites where there's a redirect to a completely different domain. :smile:

  • Camiel
    Camiel
    Community Member

    Hi. I would like to add my drop into the bucket: I need to merge items in 1password.
    I have soo many 're-used password'-warnings and they are all for the same password and account across different domains. Often on the app and on the website, often at url's like 'register.domain01.com' and 'domain.com'.
    Please give this priority, i have accumulated 353 items and i don't want to manually go copy-pasting fields for all of those to keep my vault clean and organised.

  • ag_yaron
    ag_yaron
    1Password Alumni

    Hey @Camiel ,
    Thanks for chiming in here.

    Until this feature becomes a reality, the best thing you can (and should) do is to add all relevant URLs of a specific domain into the same login item and delete the other login items.

    Keep in mind that we do not recommend using the same credentials for multiple websites, but if its only cases like you described where there is an app domain and the actual website's domain, then that's fine and only adding both URLs to the same login will do the trick :)

  • Lou_
    Lou_
    Community Member

    +1 on merge exactly as Camiel said. After an import I have many entries for the same domain and the same password, but with different login URLs. Rather than have to manually edit each one I'd like to merge each set.

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    Thank you for chiming in on this as well @Lou_ :+1: :)

This discussion has been closed.