Label Limits : Best Practices for Management & Cleaning -- Power Ups ?

[Nils Geylen]

We have resource boards that have a lot of labels.

One or two boards in particular have been getting the limit warning at 900, and I've fixed this intermittently by deleting a few that caught my attention.

Label management IMO has been somewhat lacking I feel, so it's incredibly difficult to get a good view of what's there (look up similar labels, doubles, typos, low usage etc.)--and streamline all this across boards.

I've tried clicking and scrolling through the little label popup, filtering, views, but that all turns out to be very cumbersome.

So I'm at a point where I'm going to download the CSVs and do a manual filter and cleanup in a spreadsheet so I can go back to the board and manually fix.

• Is there anyone who's encountered this and come up with a better solution?
• Are any of the dozen powerups I found useful for this chore?
• Is there any Atlassian product that could handle this?

We have at least five of these label-heavy boards and I'm going to have to find a way to combine those in my table and create myself some kind of tool, and I'm now looking at Airtable for this.

Any ideas?

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PS For those interested: we're a literary non-profit and our resource boards are catalogues of excerpts; five boards cover a broad theme and each has about five lists for sub-themes. We use labels there as static keywords rather than actionable todos--10 years ago this seemed like a brilliant idea; also, I don't think this label count will keep growing after all this time because at some point categorisation does end, so we do want to stay with Atlassian but clean things up.

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen · Accepted solution]

This free PowerUp can batch update (add and remove labels in bulk on the cards) : https://trello.com/power-ups/6779abb0e786003b26f7763a ... Have not tried how wieldly it is with 700 labels though

Not heard anyone make something to deal with the labels themself (there are often too few to build batching tools) but should be fairly simple with the API so could build something for you if the task is not possible with above

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

I'm thinking... What if we built a tool (we can host it here first: https://trellotools.azurewebsites.net and perhaps later turn it into a PowerUp) that could list all labels Alphabetically (or by color) and give information next to each of the how many cards it is used on.

And then next to that have an action dropdown with options:

• Delete this Label
• Replace with This label <new label selection>

I think that would be the best way to do a cleanup via such an overview (trying to guess or use AI to detect the duplicates is properly a bit to inaccurate). 

Main concern would the performance of the tool (if you have 700 label you properly also have several thousands of cards)

Also something to concider is if this should also apply to archived cards (properly needed so even more cards)

Finally doing something cross board would be doable, but would complex a lot of things so best IMHO if it was a single board tool

[Nils Geylen]

Hey, that's your Power-up! Cool.

I'll have a look.

I'm currently exporting the boards to see if I can make a quick spreadsheet at least of what's there. That's already turning into a headache LOL.

While ten years ago, I was pretty rigorous with the 5x5 themes for our archive, I've not been as strict with these labels and I need to start putting constraints on them.

Said sheet might well be a good start for that, so it's not wasted work.

Creating a power-up may not be within my expertise or my levels of ambition--I've been "computing" since 1982 and I'm now more than happy to give up when the easy fix isn't there ;-)

If Atlassian are reading along: I'd really hoped for some advances in label management by now but I'm starting to see how complicated it gets.

By the way, the card count is still somewhat limited per board, a couple hundred (but one card can have up to a dozen labels if thoroughly described) so times five+ boards, yeah, the total archive contains a couple thousand.

I'll worry about reaching those cards-per-board limits when we get there LOL.

Thanks, I'll update and accept when I land somewhere near a solution to this.

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

>Creating a power-up may not be within my expertise or my levels of ambition

I was thinking I could make the PowerUp for you / the community if you are interested in being an early tester (I have some spare time tomorrow and should not take more than a couple of hours to make)... 

[Nils Geylen]

Sorry, this got drowned a bit. I'd try anything for sure.

I tried your Batch updater and it works well at first, but it doesn't seem to be able to load all the labels, like you said probably because of the volume.

So I had this case where I looked for labels like "ambition" and "ambitious" so I could resolve their unnecessary similarity, and when I solved one and went back to the other it didn't appear in the list anymore.

It's my own need for tidiness that wants me to resolve all of this "once and for all". Usually, I spot a label, have a bit of time, and do just the one.

But like I said with +5 boards each with hundreds of labels, that's something where a universal interface you could sort, edit etc. would be nice.

I love your Power Ups though, they look clean and lean and very helpful.

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Nils Geylen : If you want, you can check out https://trellotools.azurewebsites.net/LabelManager and see if it is a more effective way to clean up the labels than the spreadsheet

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Nils Geylen : And if any further sorting or filtering / tweaks is needed then let me know

[Nils Geylen]

Cool.

The spreadsheet I've given up for now; too much time intensive for a private obsession. It could work, but exporting, cleaning, importing, pivoting, filtering etc. for something that then immediately becomes obsolete? Not a great solution. (I've not yet tried Airtable, but I'm not optimistic.)

I tested this and it looks like it could work (I'm not even sure what 'what-I-think-I-need' should even look or work like) but I suppose it struggles with the label volume.

I see only one label starting with B and I have about 20 of those on the board.

I spotted one I thought I could try 'Replace with' on, but the 'with' picker didn't show the alternative synonym--which definitely is on the board. Again, I suppose because of the massive amount of labels--particularly on these two overweight boards; the ones I'm getting the occasional "you're reaching 900 labels" on.

Another issue would be I'd need "live change on multiple selected" labels.

Say I check

• "Bold"
• "Beautiful"
• "Bold-Beautiful"
• "Bold-Beautiful (an obvious duplicate after a card move) and
• "Bold and Beautiful"

(this is the reality of a situation where labels have been tied to the underlying single board table and not centralised for over a decade!)

then I'd need a tool that allows me to live change "Bold-Beautiful" to Bold-Beautiful-2", filter those, add "Bold and Beautiful" to them (if they don't also have it) and then remove the erroneous label. Same for the first two '"Bold" and "Beautiful" so I can remove those.

That is a big ask from any tool!

And my conundrum is I cannot open two tabs, apply a filter in one, and then apply another filter in the other tab--because that changes my view automatically to the "This board has filters applied" view.

Final options might be creating separate table Views, or using my test account as a temporary member in another browser.

If not, I'm just stuck with gradually and manually trying to solve the problems I see when I spot them--and that's what I've been doing ad hoc as a default so that's okay.

Thanks though. It's magnificent effort and I've already tried a few things that did work with either.

[Nikola Perisic · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nils Geylen 

I didn't find any appropriate apps for managing labels in Trello. Have you tried utilising the Trello API, especially this endpoint: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/trello/rest/api-group-labels/#api-labels-id-delete

I'd try using ChatGPT to create a python script that takes the list of labels and deletes them.

[Nils Geylen]

I will look into that, thanks, but it's not my strong point.

Also, this would be a very deliberate (thoughtful) process (evaluating these keywords) and imagining this going through an AI I'm not sure how that would work.

That said, I could try to have it assist somehow--that's a splendid idea.

[Nikola Perisic]

Other than that, I don't see any other effective solutions.