Educate me on Finder tags please

[SnowCrocodile]

I used Windows for a very long time and obviously file tags are not a thing there. So I used a hierarchical folder system instead. Which is OK but is still far from optimal.

I want to organize my records but I am concerned that this may end up creating a bigger mess. I will inevitably have multiple tags and many of them would be subject specific (e.g. tags for organizing car service records are going to be different from tags for health records).

Here's what I am afraid is going to be a limitation - am I overthinking this?

• No way - that I know of - to have folder specific tags
• No way - that I know of - to have all tags, used everywhere, show in one place (I don't want to have a gazillion tags in the side bar)
• No nesting tags
• No easy way - that I know of - to search for a combination of tags

Any tips / tricks / suggestions /comments?

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Finder tags are pretty neat, and I'm just getting started with them. I'm a very long-term "hierarchical folder" user myself, and it's going to take me a while to convert over - and in fact, I may decide that the "old way is better" (for me) but I'm giving it a try.

But to address your questions:

1. Folders can be tagged, but there's no "folder specific tag" - a tag means something; you can tag a file or tag a folder.
2. There is an "All Tags" option in Finder sidebar, in addition to the individual tags. You can hide or view the tags in the sidebar using the carat > to the right of "Tags" when you hover over it.
3. Correct, no nesting. Tags ARE NOT a hierarchy and that's where a lot of their power lies. It's also the biggest thing I have trouble wrapping my head around, and the thing that might push me back to just a traditional folder structure.
4. There is an easy way! In the Search box in Finder, type a tag name - and click the name under "Tags." Then do it again to add other tags to the search. See screenshots; I may not be explaining it well but it's clear when you see it.

 

[jamietshaw]

Re. specific tags for a folder – not possible, unfortunately, so it does mean you end up with tag names system-wide that don't make sense in most contexts.

Seeing list of tags – they are in Finder > Settings > Tags

The example in the previous post will only show files that have both yellow AND green tags. This sounds like what you want but if you ever want files that have yellow AND/OR green tags, you can press Cmd-F (File > Find) to set more precise crtiera. In the screenshot, the file is shown because it matches ANY of the tags being searched for. To get this section to appear, hold down Option when clicking on the plus button. And then “Tags” won’t be in the list initially, but you’ll find it in “Other”.

 

[Ben J.]

You might also check out 'Smart folders'.
Lets you create a folder with kindofa built-in search.
Takes a bit of experimenting, but can be extremely powerful.

Create or change a Smart Folder on Mac

In the Finder on your Mac, use Smart Folders to automatically find and organize files by type and subject matter.

support.apple.com

 

[losthismarbles]

If you're wasting time learning a new system you do not need for something you've been doing your whole life just fine without?

I'd say the conclusion is self-evident.

But.. if you want to put the time in regardless.. just because.. some reason? By all means ignore me 🙂
Tags could be a thing if you have tons of texts/images and a mass/broad segmentation (green vs red) made sense for you personally.
But given where we are today in terms of software, i'd still not see a point to investing time in tagging.

You want to actually do your thing quicker?
Buy this:

Find Any File

apps.tempel.org

Much faster, complete searching, with a ton of custom parameters, to a degree of specialisation/individualisation i found amazing. Including, on the opposite end of this, something as general as searching for 'x' or 'y' type of file(s) or content/metadata even. And on the plus side, Spotlight independent; which is a boon, not a malus.
It's a steal for 6 bucks.

 

[maflynn]

I've been using the mac for what feels like eons, and I've not used tags or labels within the finder

 

[ignatius345]

I have tried to use Finder tags for ages now, but inevitably my lizard brain just wants to put stuff in folders even though I know tags could be a lot more useful.

 

[svenmany]

Tags are great and you could really benefit if you dedicated a bit of time to learning how best to use them. I applaud your efforts.

Tags are critical to how I work in DEVONthink and Fastmail (they call them labels). I don't use them in the Finder windows because of the flat presentation. Both DEVONthink and Fastmail allow tags to be nested. That's not just groupings of tags, but tags within tags. If Finder windows just offered a way to group tags, then I might find it useful.

DEVONthink, like Finder, supports both folders and tags. Fastmail makes you choose between the two approaches for organizing your mail. Once I switched away from folders in Fastmail, so many possibilities opened up.

I have configured DEVONthink to share tags with macOS, so that I do have a million tags visible in Finder windows. But I never use them there. Even though DEVONthink maintains a nested structure, the corresponding Finder tags are flat. So, two identically named tags in DEVONthink might considered the same tag in Finder. DEVONthink manual warn about using the same named tag in more than one place:

Tagging methods and philosophy is full of strong opinions. Many people feel tagging should always be flat; only top level tags and no hierarchies. DEVONthink accommodates both approaches. However, if you want to used nested tags, we hope you carefully consider the caution we've presented and use a hybrid method to avoid unexpected behavior.

Tags can be amazing in Spotlight. Open the spotlight window and type "tag:xyz". That's a pretty quick way to get to what you want.

There are third-party applications that work with tags. If you find Finder's presentation in the sidebar hard to work with, then you might consider looking at other ways to work with tags.

5 Apps You Can Use to Take Tags to the Next Level on Your Mac

Tags are a great way to organize files and folders on your Mac, and you can do even more with tags using these Mac apps.

www.makeuseof.com

And there's the new https://taggytagger.com/.

If you have a lot of content on disk, just using folders can be very limiting; a file can be in only one folder but can have many tags. Searching with Spotlight can help but not all content is indexed. Tags would open up a lot of organizational possibilities. They are very flexible.

 

[silvertech]

I also struggle to use Tags, I do understand them but have always had issues balancing them between two Macs. Also I keep my files in pretty good order already so I don't feel the need for tags right now. Maybe I'm missing out though.

 

[ignatius345]

I also struggle to use Tags, I do understand them but have always had issues balancing them between two Macs.

Any files you’re syncing with iCloud Drive will sync tags. I believe Dropbox also syncs them? Not sure about Google Drive.

 

[svenmany]

Any files you’re syncing with iCloud Drive will sync tags. I believe Dropbox also syncs them? Not sure about Google Drive.

I just did some limited testing of Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Proton Drive. Only Dropbox syncs tags.

Tags are stored in a file's extended attribute named "com.apple.metadata:_kMDitemUserTags". That extended attribute is indexed by Spotlight.

I've read an AI response from Claude regarding which cloud providers synchronize extended attributes. The response says that only iCloud is reliable in this regard. Dropbox is considered unreliable. But, Dropbox does advertise that it supports the particular "tags" extended attribute:

What extended attributes does Dropbox support?

Extended attributes apply additional metadata to your files. Find out which extended attributes Dropbox syncs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

help.dropbox.com

I guess these cloud providers are cross platform. So if you sync to a non-mac and then from there to a different mac, there might be issues. Claude says about Dropbox:

Extended attributes may survive if staying Mac-to-Mac within the same account, but this is not guaranteed

 

[AbeLincoln1984]

Tags?

I've tried to get into tagging things several times in my computing life and never quite caught on with me.

I guess if I had files that I'd want in more than one folder, they'd be handy.

Nowadays I'm more likely to have big general folders and search for things as needed; it's just faster.

 

[svenmany]

I've tried to get into tagging things several times in my computing life and never quite caught on with me.

I guess if I had files that I'd want in more than one folder, they'd be handy.

Nowadays I'm more likely to have big general folders and search for things as needed; it's just faster.

In my younger days that might have sufficed for me. As I've aged, I often forget what I know about a topic. This morning I started wondering about a particular crypto thing. When I searched for topic "crypto", I encountered some notes I'd taken on HD wallets. That got my mind focused on something that helped my thinking, but I never would have thought to look for "HD wallets" in a search.

I first looked in DEVONthink for "crypto". A bunch of documents came up. Many were tagged with "crypto" and "hdwallet". Then I could focus on the "hdwallet" tag and see the documents I collected about that subtopic.

Tagging (or adding labels) is kind of a defensive strategy I use when I first gather documents. Adding a bunch of concept tags to a document helps a ton when I come back later trying to remember what are the concepts that were important to me when I was studying.

But in the end it's exactly what you said - I want a file in more than one folder. A file often has a number of important concepts that each deserve recognition and recollection.

I think younger people can use their own brains for a lot of what I count in my tools for.

 

[T Coma]

I'm like the OP in that I like the concept of tags but my numerous half-hearted attempts to use them have never really taken off, probably because I never understood ideal utilization. I've only ever seen them as an arbitrary (and unintuitive) method to categorize files and folders, and without a legend somewhere, the tags can become meaningless - at least that's the limit I hit. I'll occasionally stumble on some files that I apparently tried to organize with tags, with assorted colored tags next to them: "Hmm, I wonder what these mean?"