Transfer Finder tags between files

[zqbobs]

I have a large number of scanned photos (thousands) that have been (laboriously) tagged in Finder. Now, I want to rescan many of the photos - is there any way to transfer Finder tags from the old files to the new ones without resetting them all, one by one? Please say yes!

 

[appltech]

As far as I know, you cannot transfer tags from one group of files to another. At least there's no obvious way. You can only "preserve" those tags when copying them to another location or sending via email.
But, what do you know, here's a suggestion: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250604400

 

[gilby101]

I use this script to create another script which will apply tags to all files (in case they have lost them).

It does require the "tag" command. You get this with HomeBrew.

/usr/local/bin/tag -tf '*' > tag.txt
sort tag.txt > alltag.txt
# " -> \" Tags, tab, file Remove trailing spaces Echo file tag, Tags, space, "file"
sed -e 's/\"/\\\"/g' alltag.txt | awk -F"\t" '{ print $2 "\t" $1}' | sed -e's/[[:space:]]*$//' | awk -F"\t" '{print "echo \"" $2 "\" ; " "tag -s " $1 " \"" $2"\""}' > alltagset.sh
chmod +x alltagset.sh

The comment is supposed to line up with the various bits in the sed and awk line!! That line just mucks about with the alltag.txt so can't hurt your system whilst you debug it.

You can change the first line to restrict to just the folder with the old photos.

You can either modify alltagset.sh to refer to the new files (I assume the same names) or rename folders so the the new photos are in the same place as the old ones were originally.

I don't blame you if you prefer a nice gui app, but in that case I can't help you