Manage users and roles

Each person who uses Tilecast Studio should have an individual account. An Owner or Administrator can manage accounts from Settings > Users.

An account has three separate settings. Role is what the person can do. Content access is which media they can reach. Screen access is which screens they can reach. Role comes first, and the other two narrow where it applies.

Add an account

1. Open Settings > Users.
2. Enter the person’s Name, Username, and a Temporary password. The password must contain at least 12 characters.
3. Choose a Role.
4. If the role can see screens, choose their Screen access: All screens, or Only selected locations and Display Groups and tick the places they work in.
5. Select Add user.

The person signs in with that username and password. Tilecast’s Studio accounts are local to the installation.

Choose a role

Tilecast has five built-in roles. They are fixed, so an upgrade never changes what a role can do.

Role	What the role can do
Owner	Manage the entire installation, including backups and integration tokens.
Administrator	Manage the installation except for Owner-only system operations. Administrators can create and edit Editor, Contributor, and Viewer accounts, but can’t grant Owner or Administrator.
Editor	Create and publish content, and manage screens and playback.
Contributor	Create and edit content, but can’t publish a Layout, delete anything, or put content on a screen.
Viewer	Read-only access.

Contributors can’t read the audit log. Before custom roles existed, Studio hid the audit log from Contributors but the server still returned it. The server now refuses the request too.

Create a custom role

When a built-in role gives too much or too little, go to Settings > Roles and select Create role. Name the role, then turn on the actions it allows, grouped by area: Media, Widgets, Playlists, Screens, and so on. Turning on an action also turns on what it needs. Uploading, for example, turns on viewing media.

You can only give a role what your own role allows. Only an Owner can give a role the ability to manage people or roles. A change to a role applies to everyone who has it on their next request, with no need to sign out.

Select Duplicate on a built-in role to start a custom role from it. You can’t delete a role while anyone has it.

Limit media access

In the user’s editor, open the Content access tab. Choose Entire library, or choose Only selected folders and tick the folders. A folder includes everything inside it. Media that isn’t in any folder stays hidden from an account limited to folders.

Under Tags they can apply, choose Any tag or Only selected tags. Tags label media, for example to feed a Tag-driven Playlist. They never make media visible: an allowed tag on media in someone else’s folder doesn’t show that media.

A new account starts with the same media reach as the person who creates it. If you have the whole library, choose Only selected folders before you add the user to limit them. An account with no content access saved can’t see any media. For a worked example, see Give a teacher access to one folder.

Limit screen access

Screen access is always an explicit choice. In the user’s editor, open the Screen access tab and choose one of these:

• All screens reaches every screen, including screens added later.
• Only selected locations and Display Groups reaches the screens in the locations you tick, and the screens in the Display Groups you tick.

If you choose Only selected locations and Display Groups and tick nothing, the account reaches no screens. That never falls back to the whole fleet. An account created through the API without a screen access choice also starts with no screens.

Screen access doesn’t change which media the account can reach. Owner access always covers every screen.

If your own screen access is limited, you can only give other people the locations and Display Groups that were given to you directly, and you can’t give anyone All screens.

A person with limited screen access works only with what they can reach:

• They pair a new display into one of their own locations, and they can’t reject a pairing request from hardware Tilecast hasn’t seen.
• They create a Display Group by choosing at least one of their screens for it.
• A Display Group, schedule, takeover, or update that also reaches screens outside their access doesn’t appear for them, or can’t be changed by them.
• They can’t create, rename, or delete Locations or Presentation Networks. Those settings change what other people reach, so they need the Manage locations or Manage Presentation Networks permission and access to all screens.

The full rules are in Screen access.

Suspend or remove an account

Clear Account active to suspend the account. You can turn it back on later. Delete permanently removes the login, preferences, and security credentials and cannot be undone.

If someone loses access to their authenticator, passkeys, and recovery codes, an Owner or Administrator can select Reset in an account they can manage under Two-step verification. Only an Owner can reset an Owner or Administrator account. Resetting signs the person out everywhere and clears all enrolled factors; they must enroll again.

You can’t change your own role, content access, or screen access. The last active Owner can’t be removed or demoted.

For organization sign-in requirements, see Protect Studio accounts.