Can someone explain the difference between:
- Identities
- Categories
- Tags
- Vaults
- Collections
- Accounts
They all seem to be ways of organizing your information. What would be a reason one would choose one over another. Thanks.
1Password Version: 8.9.4
Extension Version: 2.3.7
OS Version: 12.6
Browser:_ Firefox 105.01
Comments
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Hi there @senioruserfriendly
I'll be happy to describe what these are all used for.
Identities
An Identity is a bit like a contact card. It should contain all the information about you that you would regularly autofill into websites, such as name, date of birth, address, email address, phone number, and so on.
You can have more than one Identity if you need to, but generally, you'll only need one.
Categories
Items in 1Password come in different types, called Categories. The main one you'll use is Login – a username and a password for a website. Other categories include Credit Cards, Medical Records, Passports, Documents, and many others (including Identities, as above).
There's a full list of all the categories and what they do here:
Tags
Tags are a way to organize your items. You can assign multiple tags to the same item and find all items under a specific tag by clicking it in the sidebar. You can find out more about using Tags (and Favorites) here:
☞ Organize with favorites and tags
Vaults
A vault is where your items are stored, just like a physical vault. You can have more than one vault in your account. If you have an individual account, you'll have a Personal vault when you start using 1Password.
If you're part of a family account, you'll have a Private vault that no-one else can access, and a Shared vault that everyone can access and change. If you're part of a team, you might have access to multiple vaults from day one.
Collections
A collection is a group of one or more vaults, which might span across accounts, but doesn't have to.
For example, I have a lot of vaults in 1Password across multiple accounts for various purposes. Most of the time, I only need to work with the items in my Private vault and those shared with my partner and family, so I've made an "Everyday" collection for that.
If you're using an individual account and only have one vault, this won't be something you'll need because everything is already in one place. But if your vault situation gets a bit busier (particularly if you use 1Password at work as well), collections can be a way to help focus only on the things you need at any time.
☞ Use collections to create custom groups of vaults
Accounts
A 1Password account is a membership to 1Password.com. That might be an individual account, a family account, or a team account. If you use 1Password at work, you'll probably have two – your account at work, and your own account. (And if you work at 1Password, you'll probably have even more than that! 😅)
I hope that explains all of those in a useful way, but please do ask if you'd like anything clarified or you have any other questions. :)
— Grey
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Thank you. That is helpful. It is more than I need. It would be wonderful to hide all but the ones I need. I realize some may need each of these features, but it seems that more attention has been given to making the program more complex, and I am finding that 1Password has so many choices, so many versions, that it is taking more time than I would like to invest in it. I can not find basic features, which seem to appear and disappear and are in different places in browser or standalone or online. It is unclear whether I need one or all three. And since Version 8, I seem to be having more and more problems, as there are more sites where it does not work, and I have to jump through hoops. A password program should be easy-to-use, or people will stop using it. Someone in Marketing has decided you have 45 different audiences, each with different needs, and you've spread yourself too thin to be able to support it all, and I suspect none of those segments feels you've met their needs. As you add more features for these groups, you have to charge more, and the value to each that use their own set of features becomes questionable.
1Password should be a tool that is almost invisible. It should work for me. Now I feel I work for it, At one time I had a locked excel spreadsheet online, on my mac, and on my phone with website, id, and password. It was secure, and was easier/faster to use than 1pwd.
It's as if my pillow now requires instructions.
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I'm sorry to hear you've had trouble with 1Password 8. If you'd like some good reference material to get you on the right track, I can recommend the Getting Started category of the 1Password Support website. In particular, you might find these articles helpful:
If you're having problems with specific features or using 1Password with certain websites, please do let me know, and I'll be able to get you the right help. I look forward to hearing from you. :)
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So can anyone draw a Venn diagram for using Tags, Vaults & Collections? ... or a map chart?
Thanks,
j.a1 -
I'm not much of an artist, so I'll do my best to explain the difference below as briefly as possible.
- Every item is in a vault.
- Each vault is in an account. There may be multiple vaults in an account.
- Collections are a selection of one or more vaults from one or more accounts.
- Tags are labels applied to items and exist outside of any hierarchy.
Here's a rough map of how this looks:
— Account 1 —— Vault 1 (*) —— Vault 2 (*) —— Vault 3 – Account 2 —— Vault 1 —— Vault 2 (*)
(*) These vaults can be in the same collection, even though they're across multiple accounts.
You could apply any tag to any item, in any vault, in any account, and find them using the Tags sidebar, no matter where those items are.
Hope that helps, but I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have. :)
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I have a family membership. So is there a family account and also separate accounts for each family member?
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In that case, because you can only access your “part” of the family account, the term “account” could be used to refer to either:
- the 1Password Families account as a whole
- your “user” within that account
It may be convenient to think of it that you have a user account which is part of the family account.
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