Attachments in 1Password 7

danielbahl

Hi 1Password-team.

First. Great work on the new UI for 1Password 7 for Mac. Love it. I love the clean Vault-switcher and the drag-n-drop between vaults. 1Password is on a clear track from a once very nerdy product to a every-user product. And that's great for my entire family and non-nerdy friends who I have pushed 1Password too. :+1: :love:

One of my top-wishes for 1Password 7 was better Notes. In our family we use Apple Notes to store everything from shopping-lists to private scanned documents, but I would just LOVE to migrate them into a more safe place; 1Password. After the 1Password Families service went live, I finally convinced my wife to use 1Password Family for all her logins with shared vaults across the family. But "the other stuff" inside 1Password is still not a pleasure for non-geeky persons to use :blush: Notes and Attachments inside Notes It's still somewhat nerdy.

Why don't you embed a file into the note, instead of sublinking to an entire new section (Documents). It's confusing having the same data two places. And when deleting a Document, it's just a dead link inside the Note. In 1Password 7 Beta the "File attachment" in Notes is still kinda bulky.

Also there seems to be a bug in beta1 when clicking a file from a note, it opens a new "Document"-view, and there is no way to get back to the note? You have to click away from the "Notes"-section in the sidebar, and back to "Notes" again, and then find the note.

I hope there will be room for further improvements on file-attachments in 1Password 7 as the beta progress. :money:

Best regards
Daniel
- 1Password user since version 1.1 back in 2006! :dizzy:

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1Password Version: 7.0 Beta 1
Extension Version: 1Password X 1.6.0
OS Version: macOS 10.13.3 (17D102)
Sync Type: 1Password Families

Dianeoforegon

Second wish for better attachments in v7.

Is it possible add a vote up/down for improvements/suggestions?

Ben

Thanks for the feedback, folks.

We don't track "votes" per se, as that gives the impression that the request with the most votes will be what we work on, but we do take customer feedback into account.

• 1Password user since version 1.1 back in 2006! :dizzy:

Wow! Thank you!

Ben

danielbahl

Hi Ben,

Thank you for listening.

I remember when I asked for 2-factor auth. back in 2014. I discussed the idea with David and Peri (I think) from your team, and they loved the idea. About a year later it was live :) I love that you have always listened to your customers, and I'm sure, if not in version 7, sometime in the near future, you will have a perfect Notes system too :-) Markdown is a great start, now we just need a non-sucky file-attachments implementation too :wink:

Have a great day.

Ben

I remember when I asked for 2-factor auth. back in 2014. I discussed the idea with David and Peri (I think) from your team, and they loved the idea. About a year later it was live :) I love that you have always listened to your customers, and I'm sure, if not in version 7, sometime in the near future, you will have a perfect Notes system too :-)

We certainly try. Of course we can't implement every suggestion we receive, but we do try to seriously consider all of them.

Markdown is a great start, now we just need a non-sucky file-attachments implementation too :wink:

Ha! Thanks for the laugh. It has been a stressful day (mostly good stress!) so I needed that. :)

Have a great day.

You as well.

Ben

bdonohoe

The handling of attachments is truly the one single thing that continues to keep me from switching to a subscription account. I want to switch. I want to keep paying for 1password. But attachments suddenly turning into separate objects makes such a mess of my data that I can't make the switch. I don't even have that many attachments. I just can't comprehend why they would be handled that way.

1password 7 looks awesome, though! I'll just have to buy another license and hope that by 1password 8, I can switch to a subscription…

Lars

@bdonohoe - thanks for the feedback, and we're glad you're a 1Password fan (overall). :)

Documents really are a more robust way to handle non-database entries (AKA external files), but they definitely have their downsides for some people. We're considering how we might address that in 1password.com accounts, and hopefully there'll be something that's more to your liking at some point. Cheers! :)

jonathanmorgan

Sorry to jump on an old thread, but an example of tightly coupled attachments from a Dropbox-synced vault: I have (many) shell accounts in 1password, and I attach keys (mostly public ssh and gpg keys, very infrequently private keys, often multiple of each per account) for each account to its entry as file attachments. These files could be useful in a context other than that shell account, but I think of them as being dependent children of the shell account, not separate related documents, and some - mainly the private keys - I'd rather not be available independent of the login. When I read about documents being separated from their parent login, I just want to understand how/if they remain coupled, and what you need to do to manage and update both sides of the coupling (sounds like they are effectively decoupled, but linked, and the link isn't updated if the document to which it connects is deleted). I also use a complex folder structure (soon to be nested tags, it sounds like - fine by me - the import does a good job of recreating the hierarchy) that I lean heavily on for weeding out the correct "jonathanmorgan" ssh from the haystack. If they are separate, I'd at least want to be able to get from the account login to the related, formerly attached, files, and I'd like there to be a link in the opposite direction. If they could be related in a way such that changes in tags to one are applied to the other, that would be helpful, too, so I get at all the related things if I know the tag I need (as long as items of different types appear together in a tag's view in the UI - I am afraid I don't know if this is the case off the top of my head), and I don't have to remember to update all related when I add a tag to a login. Nested tags helps a lot, but I'm still thinking I'll need to just use the 1Password account for simple things, then keep a separate vault for my work stuff since it is more complex and the account isn't quite there in handling this level of complexity. I like what you are doing. I have a subscription, too, just with another email address. I recommend it to everyone I know. I just think I am personally outside of the profile of your core users. At any rate, food for thought.

Lars

@jonathanmorgan
so the Documents function is something we'd like to better flesh out in the static support.1password.com site, but for now here's what I can tell you off the cuff: for most people's use-cases, Documents are a significantly more robust method of bringing external files into 1Password. You're probably already aware that 1Password has never and likely will never be designed as a digital filing cabinet -- if a user is looking for encrypted online storage, especially at large volume, there are many other options for that. But the ability to attach smaller files such as SSH keys or photos of your passport or items like that which are (for lack of a better word) "supporting" documentation to actual 1Password items, is a key feature for many users.

In the past, external files were handled as direct attachments, meaning: they were literally part of the record in question. No separate UUID, no way to access them except through the record to which you originally attached them. That remains the status of things in standalone 1Password. But with 1password.com, we introduced the Documents category. Right now, 1Password for Mac is the only client in which you can associate any type of file with a record. In 1Password for iOS, you can import a photo from the device's Camera Roll, but you can't do so for any other file type, and you can't link to an existing document. In 1Password for Mac, however, if you click on the Edit button for any item and scroll down, you'll see Related Items, with two buttons underneath it: Add New File and Link Existing. The former will open a navigation window and allow you to make a new Document item out of any file on your hard drive (within reason: obviously most people have the 1GB total storage limit), and a link will be created within the record you began from. Clicking "Link existing" will create the same type of link within the source record, but you'll get a pop-up for existing items -- and not just Documents, but also any other records you wish. So, for example, you can link a bank's Login to the corresponding Bank Account record, etc.

I just want to understand how/if they remain coupled...

Links are currently one-way. Meaning: if you begin in Record A and follow the procedure I outlined, you will have a link to Record B (Document, whatever) viewable within Record A's "Related Items" section, but there will be no corresponding link in Record B, nor any indication that Record A links to it. You can of course create the reverse link as well (in other words: in Record B, you can open Related Items and link back to Record A), but that's not required.

Obviously, if you delete an item for which links exist, that will break the link. There is also currently no way to maintain links if transferring items between accounts or from a 1password.com vault to a standalone vault (since links do not exist in standalone 1Password).

I'm going to stop there to see whether that's even what you were hoping for and ask if there's anything I missed or you wanted to follow up on.

jonathanmorgan

This is exactly the detail I was looking for. Thank you! I think decoupling documents from logins but allowing for links makes a lot of sense, and this implementation is a reasonable start to it. For me, however, there are a small subset of things that I consider to be so tightly coupled that I want a true containment relationship, not just a loose relation between two peers. It is few enough things that I can just put them in a separate Dropbox-synced vault, though, or a little keepass kdbx file. Thanks for the explanation.

jonathanmorgan

1 more question: How do I make a Document in a Dropbox-synced vault, so it will turn into a Document when the items are migrated to a 1Password Account? I don't see the "Document" type in my 1Password Dropbox-synced vault when I try to add a new item. Thanks!

Ben

Documents are not a feature of standalone (e.x. Dropbox) vaults. Attachments should be converted to Documents when you migrate a standalone vault to 1Password.com, though. There will be a one-way link from the item that the attachment was on to the Document item that the attachment becomes.

Ben

jonathanmorgan

Hi,

I bit the bullet and moved everything into account, and it turns out I didn't have that many attachments, and they are documents now and that is fine. All good. Thanks for all of the typing for me.

The folder structure-to-nested-tags worked great, too.

I'd be interested in hearing how you deal with syncing the different vault formats and then also the account - sounds like that might be hard to keep unified without some interesting branching. But, no need to type that for me. Maybe a blog post sometime. =)

Thanks for the help and information.

Jonathan

Ben

Thanks for the update @jonathanmorgan. Maybe we can do a DevBits blog post about syncing in the future.

Ben