Visual Layer Documentation: Visual Intelligence, At Scale

The Explore tab is the primary workspace inside a dataset. All viewing, search, filtering, cluster navigation, quality analysis, and selection happen here. For a task-oriented walk-through of the workflow this tab supports, see Exploring Datasets.

Layout Overview

The Explore tab is organized into four numbered regions that stay in place as you navigate, plus the Insights Panel on the right.

#	Region	Purpose
	Top Header	Dataset title, dataset-level stats, status indicator, and the tab row for Data, Views, Explore, and Enrich
	Filter & Search Area	Search Type Toggle, Layout Toggle, Search box, and Filter Menu
	Dataset Actions	Dataset-wide controls on the right side of the top header: status, VL Chat, notifications, share, and the three-dot menu
	Content Grid	The main display area showing clusters, images, or objects

The Insights Panel on the right of the workspace hosts insights, quality issues, labels, user tags, and metadata for the current view or selection. It stays visible alongside the numbered regions. The top header is the orientation strip across the very top of the workspace. It identifies the dataset and hosts the tab row.

Top header of the dataset workspace with dataset name, metadata tooltip, and tabs

The header contains the following elements:

Element	Description
Dataset name	The name given to the dataset at creation. See Create a Dataset for the creation flow.
Tooltip with dataset metadata	Hover the info icon next to the dataset name to reveal counts for images, objects, videos, and video frames, plus the creation date.
Tabs	The four top-level tabs that make up the dataset workspace: Data, Views, Explore, and Enrich. The currently active tab is underlined.

Dataset-wide controls sit on the right side of the top header and are documented in Dataset Actions below.

Filter & Search Area

The filter and search area is the horizontal row directly beneath the header. It holds the Search Type Toggle on the left, the Layout Toggle on the right, and the Search box and Filter Menu in the center.

Search Type Toggle

The Search Type Toggle on the left side of the filter and search area sets what you are searching against: Images or Objects. This is more than a cosmetic change — it determines which embeddings are used for search, which metadata appears in the workspace, and what every filter, search, and hover action operates on.

The Objects option is available once an object-detection model has run against the dataset. If the option is disabled, run a model such as VL-Object-Detector from the Enrich tab first. For what changes in the workspace when you flip between Images and Objects, see Switching the Search Type.

Labels, Captions, and User Tags

Each cluster card displays one metadata type at a time. Use the switch at the top of the cluster to change which metadata is shown.

The three options answer different questions about the cluster:

Option	Source	Question Answered
Labels	Class names from annotations or detection models. Image labels come from image-level classification (for example, VL-Image-Tagger) or from annotation files imported at creation time. Object labels come from an object-detection model (for example, VL-Object-Detector) and describe each detected crop individually. The two label types are independent: an image can carry its own labels while the objects inside it carry different ones from a different model.	What class does the platform think this is?
Captions	Natural-language descriptions generated by a captioning model such as VL-Image-Captioner, VL Advanced Captioner, or VL-Object-Captioner. Captions power Caption Search.	What is happening in this image or crop?
User Tags	Custom tags applied manually by users or teammates. User tags are independent of any model output. See Tag Items for how tags are created and managed.	How does our team want to organize this?

Which labels and captions appear on a cluster depends on which enrichment models have run against the dataset. For the full mapping of models to the metadata they produce, see the Model Catalog. To run or add models, go to the Enrich tab.

Click any label, caption term, or user tag in a cluster card to apply it as a filter across the dataset.

Layout Toggle

The Layout Toggle on the right side of the filter and search area switches between Visual Similarity (clustered) and Flat View. It controls how the content grid is arranged, not what appears in it, so it combines with the Search Type Toggle to produce clustered images, clustered objects, a flat image grid, or a flat object grid.

For what each layout displays, see Content Grid below. For step-by-step instructions on switching layouts, see How to Search & Filter. The center of the filter and search area contains the Search box and two adjacent buttons.

Search box with visual search upload dialog and filter menu

Element	Description
Search box	Text field that drives both Semantic Search and Caption Search. Type a natural-language description to find conceptually matching content, or use boolean operators (`AND`, `OR`, `-`, `"phrase"`) when filtering by captions. See How to Search & Filter for the full syntax.
Visual Search button	Opens the external-image upload flow for finding visually similar content. Drag and drop an image into the dialog or click Browse Images to pick one from disk. See Visual Search for all four ways to trigger visual similarity.
Filter Menu	Opens the filter menu for building and managing active queries. See Filter Controls below.

Filter Controls

The filter controls build and manage the active query. Click the Filter Menu icon next to the Search box to open the filters menu.

Filters menu with folders, files, labels, user tags, caption, duplicates, outliers, quality issues, select uniques, insertion time, and media status

The filters menu offers the following options:

Filter	Purpose
Folders	Filter by directory path or folder name
Files	Filter by filename patterns
Labels	Filter by assigned class labels or annotation status
User Tags	Filter by custom metadata tags applied to items. See Tag Items for how tags are created.
Caption	Filter by image captions using boolean operators
Duplicates	Find identical or near-identical items
Outliers	Surface anomalies that differ from the rest of the dataset
Quality Issues	Detect Blurry, Dark, or Bright images
Select Uniques	Keep only visually distinct items
Insertion Time	Filter by when an item entered the dataset
Media Status	Filter by media state

Selecting a filter opens the Query Modal for operator and threshold configuration. Active filters appear as chips in the Query Panel below the bar, combined with AND logic. A chip can be edited by clicking it, removed with X, or cleared entirely with Clear All. Save View stores the current filter combination as a named view, which then appears in both the Save View dropdown and the Views tab. For every operator, threshold, and filter-specific workflow, see the Filter Options Reference.

Dataset Actions

Dataset Actions occupy the right side of the top header and apply to the entire dataset, regardless of which tab is open.

Control	Description
Status indicator	The current dataset state (Indexing, Ready, and so on). A dataset must be Ready before its content appears in the Explore tab. Dataset status is also visible from the Dataset Inventory.
VL Chat	Conversational launcher for building searches and filters from a natural-language prompt. See VL Chat.
Notifications bell	Opens the notifications panel for alerts on this dataset, including saved-view alerts and enrichment-run completions. See Monitoring and Alerts.
Share	Opens the Share a Dataset flow for inviting collaborators.
Three-dot menu	Dataset-level actions such as rename, delete, and snapshot.

Content Grid

The content grid is the main display area and the source of all in-place actions. Its contents depend on the active layout selected from the Layout Toggle and the search type selected from the Search Type Toggle.

Cluster View

In Visual Similarity mode, the grid displays cluster cards. Each card shows a representative thumbnail, the cluster size, and label coverage. When the Search Type Toggle is set to Objects, each card groups detected object crops instead of full images.

Hovering any cluster card reveals in-place actions:

Action	Description
Find Similar	Launches a Visual Search using the cluster’s representative image as the anchor.
Open cluster	Click the card to drill into its individual images or objects.

For the concepts behind clustering and embeddings, see How Search & Filter Work. For cluster navigation tips and examples, see Understanding Clusters. For multi-step workflows that combine clusters with filters, see Recipes.

Flat View

In Flat View, the grid displays every item in a single ungrouped layout. When the Search Type Toggle is set to Images, each cell is a full image; when set to Objects, each cell is a detected object crop. Object-level browsing becomes available once an object-detection model has run against the dataset — see the Enrich tab for the workflow.

Hovering any item reveals in-place actions:

Action	Description
Find Similar	Runs a Visual Search using the hovered item’s embedding as the anchor.
Select	Toggles the item into the current selection.

Clicking an image opens its details page, where a Region of Interest crop can launch a crop-based Find Similar search. See Search Against a Region of Interest for the full flow.

Insights Panel

The Insights Panel runs along the right edge of the workspace and shows insights about the current view or selection. Its panels update as filters change, views change, or items are selected.

The panel exposes the following sections:

#	Panel	Description
	Enrichment Models	The models that have run against the dataset and any available preview shortcuts. See Enrich Your Datasets for the run flow and the Model Catalog for every available model.
	Issues	Quality-issue counts with drill-in links for each category: Duplicates, Outliers, Dark, and Blurry. Clicking any row applies the corresponding filter. For the signal-quality concepts behind these categories, see How Signal Quality Is Measured.
	Labels	The label distribution for the current view. Clicking a label filters by it. To bring labels in from an external annotation file, see Importing Annotations.
	User Tags	The user tags applied to items in the current view. Clicking a tag filters by it. See Tag Items for how tags are created and managed.
	Metadata	The custom metadata fields available for filtering. See Custom Metadata for how to attach metadata at creation time or via the API.

Dataset Interface Reference

Overview of the full dataset workspace and the four tabs

How to Search & Filter

Step-by-step guide to running searches and filters

Views Tab

Saved combinations of filters and search queries

Enrich Tab

Model selection and enrichment progress tracking

Introduction

Quick Start

Explore & Search

Collab & Downstream

Models & Enrichment

Advanced Creation & Management

Integrations

Troubleshooting

Explore Tab

Layout Overview

Top Header