An Introduction To Mac Finder Tags

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the basics of using Mac Finder Tags.

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In the Finder on your Mac you can apply one or more Tags to files or folders. Tags can help you label and categorize items in the Finder and help you build your own organizational system. So, for instance, here I am in the Finder and I have a variety of folders and I have files in all those folders. Now what I can do in addition to having files with good names inside of folders with good names is I can apply Tags to any of these items. Now you're going to see Tags in the left sidebar usually at the bottom if you scroll down. If you don't see anything under Tags click on the little disclosure triangle to the right and then you get your list of tags below. If you haven't used Tags before chances are you just have a set of default tags which are the names of colors. It is not really very useful to use color names for tags. These are just there as examples. 

So if you wanted to Tag a file, like say this one, you could do that in many different ways. For instance, I could Control click, right click, two-finger click on a trackpad, and then select one of the Tags here. Notice that each tag is represented by a little circle with a color. But if I move my pointer over it I see the name of the tag under it. So if I wanted to tag this file with red I could just click there. Now you can see in the Finder here that not only do you see the file name but you'll see a dot with that color in it to the right. You could also Control click and then use the Tags item below those chips there and then you get this little window that appears and you can select one of the colors here or you could type the name of the tag. The idea that eventually you're going to have way more tags than you could see here in a short list so you'll just type the name of the tag. But you could also use this to create a new tag by typing the name. I'm going to add the orange tag to this file. But notice that the window doesn't go away. I can add another tag to any file. I can add more than one tag to any file. So I have this file tagged both orange and red. Now you're going to see both of those dots here. 

You can also tag files by simply dragging them to these items here in the left sidebar. So if I drag this over to red and drop you can see how it gets that red tag. In addition you can select a file and then use Command i to get info. I'm going to use Command Option i to bring up the Inspector instead. The advantage of the Inspector is it will stay there as I select different files. I don't have to open up a new Info window for every file. You can see here at the top it shows me the tags there. I can click in there and add a new tag. I can also just type in here, for instance, if I start typing the name of a tag it will auto-complete. I can press return and now you can see I've got these three tags applied to this file here. Then you can see I now have three dots represented here in the Finder. 

As I mentioned before you can create a new tag just by typing it here. So let's create a new tag called Work. I'll just type Work and press return and you can see the tag is added there. Now when I select a different file, like this one, I can easily add Work there by typing it or, since I don't have very many tags, it's going to appear in this list. I'll also see it appear here at the bottom of this list in the left sidebar. There is only so much room for tags here. So after you've added a few you're only going to see the most commonly used ones. But this does make it very easy to, say, select another file and drag it to that tag there to add that tag. Notice that since I have not assigned a color to this tag it won't appear here in the Finder list. I just see the colored dots not the blank dots. 

So to manage your tags you can go to Finder and then Settings and then under Tags you can see all your tags. You can select a tag like this and then move your pointer over the dot next to it, click on the little down arrow there to assign a color to it. So I can make this the yellow dot. So now you could see a bunch of yellow dots appear here because I have added Work as a tag and you can even see Work now shows up as yellow. You can also use this list here to select tags that you're not using, like this one here. I can Control Click on it and Delete the Tag. I can also decide which ones appear in the left sidebar. So I can remove ones from that and now you can see I only see the ones that I've got selected there. 

Now how do you use Tags? Well, you can easily see all files with a tag by simply selecting the Tag on the left. If I click on red you can see it goes to a special view where I'm viewing all of the files tagged with red. It doesn't matter which folder they are in. They'll just be here in a list and I could use all the standard Finder views to see these. If I want to see all the orange files I can do that. If I want to see all the ones I've tagged with Work I can do that. 

To remove a Tag all you need to do is Control Click on a file and you'll see some tags here that are checked or not. If I click on the X there for a tag it removes it. A better way to remove one is to bring up either the Info window or Inspector, like that, and you can see the tag there and select it and delete it or you can just Edit this like a text field going back and forth with arrow keys and deleting various tags. So you can see here I've removed all tags from this file. 

Once a file is tagged there is two main ways to use it. One is to look at a list of everything with that tag. The other is to simply use the dots as a visual aid to quickly find a file. The idea here is that you can easily organize your files this way. Like, for instance, in my projects folder here I've been using folders called Project Alpha and Project Beta and putting all of the files for those projects in those folders. But instead I could have selected all of the files here. I'm going to Control Click and go to Tags and then I'm going to add Alpha as a tag. Then I'm going to go into the Beta folder here and select all of these files and that folder and Control Click and then go to Tags and then create a Tag called Beta applied to all of those. So now if I look at the tags here I can look at all my Alpha files there and all by Beta project files there. If I don't want to I no longer need to have these folders. I can just have all these files at the main level of this Project Folder. Where this really comes in handy is if a file applies to more than one project. With folders there is no way to do that. I would have to have a copy of this image in my Project Alpha folder. But if I'm using it in Project Beta I'd have to make another copy of it and put it in my Project Beta folder. But here I could simply go to this file here and add the Beta Tag to it as well. So now it will appear in both projects. When I look at the Alpha Tag it is there. When I look at the Beta tag it is there. 

For a lot of people having one file applied to more than one project or category is very common. Folders will fail you if you're trying to organize like that. For instance say you do client work. This file here applies to a specific client. So I'm going to add that client as a tag. Then this file here, that applies to a different client. So I'll add that client there. But perhaps this file is something that applies to both clients. Well, I could easily add both clients to this file as Tags and now when I look at each client's tag I'll see the appropriate files even though one of those is shared between the two clients. 

Say you're a graphic designer and you use a piece of art for several different clients. You want to make sure that at anytime you could provide the clients with all of their files, you could take that one file with the names of all the clients that apply and then anytime you look at the tag for that client you will see that file even though there is just one file and that file is used by multiple clients. 

Here's another example. You've got two files here and they both have to do with your taxes. Now you may file these away in different folders having to do with different years but sometimes you just want to see all of your tax info. So you could take these two files here and I'm going to apply the tag Taxes. Now that is set to both of these items. So anytime I look at Taxes I'm going to see anything with that tag applied no matter which folder it is in. Now I can feel free to put these files in different locations based on year and yet still have one place where I can easily see them all. 

One of the best things about Tags is they work perfectly with iCloud Drive. So you're going to see the same Tags across all of your different devices including any iPads and iPhones. In the Files App on the iPad and iPhone you can also view your files by Tags, assign Tags, and so on. So if you really like to do a good job organizing your files but you're not using Tags yet I hope this encourages you to look into them. Thanks for watching.