Tags: your own words on your dives

Some things about a dive don't fit in a field.

Divebase has a home for your depth, your duration, your gas, your gear, your buddies and your conditions, and between them they describe most of what happened underwater. What they don't describe is that it was a night dive, that it was the checkout for a course, that it was the spring cleanup you do every year, or that it was that one wreck you keep coming back to. There is no field for those, and there shouldn't be: they're your categories, not mine.

That's what tags are. Your own words, on your own dives, in whatever vocabulary you already think in.

This one has been waiting a long time. When I wrote about the MacDive import I had to be honest about the handful of things that still didn't come across, and tags were on that short list: Divebase read them out of your database, but only used them as hints, so a CCR tag set the dive's mode and a Wreck tag marked the site, and then they were thrown away. They weren't kept as tags you could browse and filter by. Today that paragraph is out of date, which is the best thing that can happen to a known gap.

A tag is deliberately the thinnest record in Divebase: a name, and nothing else. No colour, no description, no category, no hierarchy. Everything a tag means lives in the word you picked, and that is exactly what makes it cheap enough to apply without stopping to think about it.

On the dive

Open a dive and its tags are right there in the header, on the same line as the rating and the trip, so you know what kind of dive it was before you read anything else. Past the first few, the rest collapse into a +N: a heavily tagged dive shouldn't get to push its own title around.

The Overview tab then carries the full set in a Tags panel, each one with a ✕ to take it off the dive on the spot and an Add tag action for the next. A dive with no tags yet says so and invites the first one.

Adding and removing them

Manage tags opens a single box: type a tag and press Enter, or pick one you already use.

As you type, the box filters the tags you've used before, so re-applying a familiar one is a keystroke or two. If nothing matches, it offers to create what you typed. Below the box sit the dive's current tags, each removable, and then the rest of your tags as a click-to-add list ordered by how often you use them, with the count next to each, because the honest truth is that most tagging is re-tagging.

Every add and every remove commits immediately: no Save button, nothing lost if you close the window, and the panel and the header stay in step behind it.

That list turns out to be a fairly honest picture of how you actually dive. Mine is not a set of tidy categories: it's the dive centres I've worked with, the agencies I teach for, the role I was in that day, and the citizen-science projects I log for. Not one of those has a field in Divebase, and not one of them should. That is the whole appeal of a label with no rules attached to it.

There is no tag management screen anywhere, and that's on purpose. A tag comes into being the first time you apply a name, and it disappears the moment the last dive stops carrying it. Mistype one and un-apply it and it's simply gone: your list of tags is always exactly the set of labels actually in use, with nothing to prune.

In your dive list

Tags follow your dives into the logbook list, but as a summary rather than in full: a tag icon and a count sit beside the row's date, and opening it floats the dive's tags over the row. It works with the pointer, with the keyboard, and with a tap.

A whole column of tag pills would have drowned the table for the sake of a detail you only want on one row at a time. The count tells you there's something there; opening it tells you what.

Click a tag, get those dives

Every tag you see anywhere is a link into your logbook filtered to it. Click one on a dive and you land on your dives list showing every dive carrying that tag, exactly as if you'd built the filter by hand. The condition then sits in the Filter control like any other, ready to be dropped again.

Click one from inside the list and it behaves slightly differently, and this is the part I fussed over most. There it narrows what you're already looking at instead of replacing it: your other filters, your search and your sort all survive, so you can go from "my wreck dives" to "my wreck dives that were also night dives" by clicking the tag you spotted on a row. Throwing away the filters you'd already set would be answering a question you didn't ask. A tag you're already filtered to isn't a link at all, since clicking it would do nothing.

Your MacDive tags are waiting for you

The MacDive importer now brings both of MacDive's labelling concepts across. MacDive carries tags and dive types, and I've never found the distinction between them convincing, so Divebase models one thing: a MacDive tag imports verbatim, and a MacDive dive type imports as a tag named type: Wreck, type: Night, and so on. That is why the screenshots above are full of them: those are my own MacDive labels, a decade of them, sitting in Divebase.

That prefix is a convention and nothing more. Nothing parses it, nothing reserves it, nothing renders it differently. It's an ordinary name you could have typed yourself, and you can rename it out of existence by applying the tag you'd rather have and removing this one.

If you already imported your MacDive database, run it again: the import only ever adds, your dives are recognised and skipped rather than duplicated, and the tags come in on top of what's already there.

What's next

Three things are on the list and deliberately not in this release. Bulk tagging from the list, to label a whole trip's worth of dives in one go, needs a multi-select the listing doesn't have yet. A tags index would be the natural home for renaming and merging tags. And colour would let tag families read apart at a glance, though a colour I picked for you would mean nothing, so that one waits for a place to pick your own.

In the meantime: go label some dives. And, as always, dive safe! 🤿