Easy two-way linking of related items (suggestion)

asrogers

Thank you for your continued feedback regarding related items. Bidirectional linking of items is something that our product team continues to track but I don't have any announcements to share. We tend to keep new features pretty close to the chest until it's time to release them. When, and if, this feature is released you'll see it mentioned in our release notes: 1Password Releases

what are the use cases for one way links? ( it seems that being able to see the link in only one directions can actually be confusing so that you cannot tell if something is linked.

Not all users will necessarily want links to be bidirectional and the current implementation allows you the choice of whether to link an item only in one direction or from each direction (manually). Personally, I'd love to see bidirectional linking of items since that fits my personal use case and I'll keep advocating for this internally.

On a technical level, 1Password tends to be pretty conservative when it comes to the editing of items and we want users to know and directly choose when items are edited. When you add a related item to an item, 1Password edits that item to add metadata that is stored inside of that item itself. The item being linked to is not changed or edited in anyway so other metadata like the Last edited value is preserved. Bidirectional linking would require that 1Password edit both items to add the required metadata to each item and that certainly can be done but it does require more processing and the process would need to be made clear to the user.

I hope that sheds some light on the considerations involved. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-37804641

in my post above ( Jan 13, 2024) , I found requests going back to 2017, and this post started in Feb 2022, over 2.5 years ago. Also a number of posters have stated that they have trouble seeing why you wouldn't want to link items in both directions and I agree, and a number of viable use cases have been articulated.

Could someone from 1Password please articulate:
a) if this is being planned?
b) what are the use cases for one way links? ( it seems that being able to see the link in only one directions can actually be confusing so that you cannot tell if something is linked.

I also think that when 2 way linking is delivered, there should be options to
a) make links that are only 1 way, to be visible in both directions, and to remove, hide, or convert any 2 separate one way links that user's have done, to not create duplicate 2 way links.

BobW

I appreciate your detailed feedback and suggestions. I've filed them with our product team internally to be considered for a future update. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-43604236

Yes, please, please, please. This has been a frustration since links were first added. I almost always want a bidirectional link, so right now I have to go through the process of manually adding on both ends, and if I'm doing some cleanup where I'm adding/changing several items, I often miss some links. Every time I fight it, I promise myself to come request this change but never do. Not this time! 😣

It looks like this has been talked about in the forums going back at least five or six years, and I'm sure there were requests for it going back to the beginning of linking. The MVP implementation also seems like a relatively straightforward reuse of existing back-end functionality with minimal UI changes, so I'm kinda surprised this hasn't been addressed yet.

Batch-linking would be fantastic to have but definitely entails some more complication and planning, so working on that later makes complete sense. (FWIW, I think a UX that maybe involved dragging a selection of items onto another might be a good approach to this one, at least as one method.)

chupon

Thank you for the feedback, I've filed your feature request with the team. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-42588905

Adding my support for this. Seems like a pretty simple feature to add.

Perhaps when linking, prompt if you want to link both ways?

Hi 1PNH, thanks for adding your +1 here! I've filed your feedback with our Product team 😄

ref: PB-39885882

I'm +1 on this.

I'd like to draw everyone here's attention to this feature request as well
https://1password.community/discussion/145377
Add your +1 there as well if you realise/need the benefit of this.

Of course I've no idea if the number of people engaged on a post here will actually impact the likelihood of product change.

Thanks, YellowVista - I've passed your +1 and details along to the Product team!

Have a great day!

ref: PB 38106095

+1 for this feature. I'd also really like a way to link Related Items across vaults. I understand the link would break if I ever lost read permissions on the vault in question. But I have a lot of Items that I would like to link together but can't because they are in separate vaults (e.g., Notes that relate to items in multiple vaults, credit cards links to items across vaults, etc.).