How To Use Tags To Organize Your Files

Instead of placing every file in a specific folder, you can tag your files for greater flexibility. Files can have more than one tag, so you can include a file with more than one project, task or collection. You can rename and assign colors to tags. You can easily view all of the files that have a tag, search for files by tag, or even create smart folders for a single tag or set of tags.

Comments: 11 Responses to “How To Use Tags To Organize Your Files”

    JC
    6 years ago

    Nice! So many people need to do this! But the hard part is getting into the habit of tagging.

    Grand
    6 years ago

    Great tip. How do you similarly best Tag 'Emails'?
    Are there simpler ways other than applications like "Mail Tags" or "Leap"

    6 years ago

    Grand: It really depends on your email server. Gmail really only does tags, called labels. But email clients, like Mac Mail, work with folders, so the labels are translated into folders. I don't use Mail Tags or Leap, but I guess they are good solutions. I just dump all of my email to my Archive folder. No tags, no folders. I find it is very easy to search email by person, subject or body text and quickly find what I need without messing with tags or folders.

    Grand
    6 years ago

    Thank you! I continue to be amazed at how dedicated & service-oriented you have been and are over the years. I'm grateful for the answer, and for the inspiration.

    Darrell
    6 years ago

    Thanks for doing this one! The practical demonstration helps.

    Brenda Brooks
    6 years ago

    Can I increase the number of tags?

    6 years ago

    Brenda: You can add as many as you like. Just keep adding them.

    Marcia
    6 years ago

    Can you add some different colors?

    6 years ago

    Marcia: No, only the colors shown. I guess the idea is that it gets hard to tell colors apart when there are too many anyway. Use the colors on some main ones and leave the rest colorless, or use colors for grouping them.

    Doug Lee
    6 years ago

    Hi Gary,
    I just started to use tags on my files. As a secondary back up strategy I drag and drop all my document files onto an external drive once a week. When I do a search in Finder for a specific tag it brings up all the files that match that criteria in my Documents and also files on my external drive. Is there a way I can ignore the external drive when searching by tags? Many thanks for your help.

    6 years ago

    Doug: When you search, you can specify at the top where you want to search. So just restrict that to the Documents folder or your hard drive.

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