Search for and attach files previously loaded to Asana

It’d be great to be able to search for and ‘attach’ files that have already been uploaded to asana rather than having to reattach them each time you want to find it. Permissions could just allow people to search files from projects and/or tasks they are part of.

We use Asana to manage marketing projects that usually have a design or graphic asset involved. For an email task, for example, there’s subtasks for writing the copy, editing it, making any necessary graphic assets, and then creating the email in our email system. If the designer uploads the file to the graphic creation task, it’s annoying to go find. If they attach it to the larger file itself, the person creating the email can’t always find it. If we could just search through previously uploaded files, we could make it easier for people (who don’t always have context of the whole project) to have the info and assets they need easily.

If it’s a series of emails all using the same task, we’d be able to easily attach the previously used asset by searching for it in our Asana instance.

And god forbid we want to use an asset from a previous task in a different one (for example…a logo file), Asana must have 100s of duplicate files uploaded to their system for just that reason. It’s hard to maintain consistency that way too.

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I confirm that this would make our lives a lot easier…

Our workflow:

  • There is one “master” task to design and implement a new interface
  • We do the work to design the interface in one subtask
  • The designer uploads the final design to the subtask
  • The person leading the “master” task has to download the design and reupload it to the following subtask (“implement design”)

Having to download the design to reupload to the following subtask is… problematic to say the least

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@Marie

Is this on development team’s radar? Here is what I did and 3 issues I faced:

Problem 1: I have two tasks that a user submitted which turned out are similar to each other. So I selected ‘Merge Duplicate Tasks’ in Task 2 and Merged it to Task 1. However that didn’t bring forward the attachments from Task 2 to Task 1, which It should have,

Problem 2: Attachments were not there so I went to Task 1, under Attachments I clicked Add new attachment Icon. There was no way to select the attachment which is already in Asana → Files section. So, I had to

  1. Click on All Tasks (Since my default view was to see only Incomplete Tasks)
  2. Find Task 2
  3. Download the attachment to my computer.
  4. Then Go to Task 1 and attach it again.
    This should have been

Problem 3: There is no easy way to see in Task 1 that there is a Task 2 which was merged to it. This sits in the comments section and with a lots of comments flowing in, this could be easy over-looked.
In Task 2 however, there is clearly mentioned right on the top that it has been merged with Task 1. So it would make it really convenient and easy traceable if we had a reference to Task 2 somewhere on the top within Task 1 as well.

If the Problem 1 didn’t exist I could have had the attachment right after I merged duplicate tasks.
If problem 2 didn’t exist I could have Selected attachment from Asana → Files section itself with 1 step rather than 4.
If problem 3 didn’t exist, I would have better visibility of the all the tasks merged to the parent task.

Please let me know if any of these problem are likely to be fixed in near future?

Thank you.

Regards,
@anon41024217

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We manage our work orders and project files via Asana’s file upload feature. A key part of this strategy is being able to find those work orders and image for repeat customers in the future. Unfortunately the search bar only allows for searching tasks and subtasks, not files. Having this capability, searching for files in Asana, would help us use Asana more completely for our workflow. Anyone have any tips on how to search for files while this feature isn’t available on Asana?

Hi @anon40551656, welcome to the Asana Community Forum and thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us!

As it stands, it’s currently not possible to search for files you have uploaded to tasks in Asana. We already have a thread on this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your posts with the main thread to consolidate feedback.

@anon41024217 thanks for sharing your use case with us! We don’t have immediate plans to implement this feature but we’ll make sure to share any updates if we have plans in the future.

Hi @Emily_Roman - is there any solution / work around to the issue @anon40551656 posted?

My team needs go one step deeper - to be able to search product numbers included within uploaded spreadsheets (csv/xls format) in order to track tasks and requests. Our data in such quantity that including it within tasks is untenable (hence the upload).

This was a client request today–to find a file they knew was uploaded to task that appeared in some project in a portfolio but didn’t know which one.

I thought Advanced Search could do it, but no–there’s no “Has attachment” parameter, nor does search work on the text of the attachment name.

It would be nice to provide some support for this somehow.

Thanks,

Larry

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I agree! Paying for this program yearly and having no support to search files is frustrating and wastes a lot of time.

It is still a very big painpoint that we cannot search for uploaded files.

With increasing number of files uploaded each day, we cannot affort to continue with Asana on the long run, if we will not be able to search files.

Searching file names has to be minimum requirement.
Fulltext search within documents is standard.

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Totally agree. Search is useless unless it also includes full text search within attachments. For some reason I thought Asana used Lucene or ELK - so this should be trivial.

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I 100% agree. I brought this up years ago. Still not an option. A wasted opportunity, not to mention royal pain in the ass trying to find what you have uploaded or remind employees it is there.

Our team is also in need for this feature. The program we moved from did have this feature. It has been requested by multiple team members. This is a big hurdle for our team when searching for files since we have multiple teams and boards. It leads to duplicative work and more projects being re-entered into Asana than necessary. Our teams are also duplicating work when you have a high volume of tasks and subtasks, it seems necessary to have a file search function.

Has there been any update here?

Agreed. This functionality would be very helpful. No change in attachment search capabilities that I could find, however, I’d like to share a workaround that allowed me to search for files within a project.

Select the Project.
Select the “Files” tab at the top. (If not present, may have to click the “+” symbol to add the tab.
All uploaded attachments should appear.
Then Ctrl+F and enter file name or key words.

Hope that helps!