Think of them like characteristics for a person: Just like you’d describe someone as "tall," "funny," "brunette," and so on, you’d tag a file "important," "tax info," "just for fun," or "work."īut why use tags, when you could just use folders?Ī file can only be in one folder at a time-but it could have an unlimited number of tags. Note, you can select multiple tags if you want to delete more than one at once.Tags are perhaps the most flexible tools for organizing your files When you do this, all files with that tag attached to it will be updated.Īt the bottom of these preferences, you can use the “+/-” buttons to add/remove tags. You can also hide tags from the Sidebar by dragging tags out it, but the Tags preference gives you better control over the process.Ĭlick on the circle next to the tag to change its color or double-click on the tag’s name to rename it. This is going to make your life quite a bit easier when it comes to overall tag management.įirst of all, you can show or hide tags in the Sidebar. Tags Preferencesįinally, here is our Tags preference tab, which can be accessed from the Finder preferences (“Command + ,”). Tags work best if you use them to describe the content of a file rather than the type of file. Simply tagging image files as “images” won’t help you much because you can search for images as a “kind” of file.
The more precisely you define your files, the more accurate your searches will be. You can also add them to the Sidebar for easy access. Saved searches can be named and saved wherever you like. It is also possible to build search queries like that and save them for later. Now, add additional tags to your search query. Spotlight is simply easier to use in cases such as this, however, you can do something similar in Finder.įirst, type your search query and choose “Tags” from the menu option. Using these two tags together ensures we only see files matching this criteria versus all “job search” tags or all “blue” tags. This one will list all our “job search” files with the “blue” tag. You can string multiple tags together into one search. Now, we have quite a few tag searching options for this group of files. While we’re at it, we can pick out the “job search” documents that are most relevant to us, then we’ll simply tag them as “blue”. First we search for our “resume” tag and add another, “job search” we do the same thing to our “cover letters” files. What if we want to see all our old resumes and cover letters in one result? In this case, we add another tag to all relevant files. We type our search and we can view results by filename or tags.Īgain, the same thing with cover letters. So, if we want to find old resumes, we can use our “resume” tag. What you are sure of is that you were smart enough to tag your job search stuff last time you updated it. You actually have your old resumes, somewhere, maybe in your documents folder or a cloud folder but you’re not sure where.
#Mac os tags multiple update#
You’re looking for a job, and you want to update your old resume. Let’s take a relevant example, something a lot of people deal with often. Once you’ve tagged enough files, you can just type your query into Spotlight or the Finder search feature.
You don’t have to use the Finder Sidebar to search for files by tags. Adding more tags means your can define your files for easier searching. Most of these files only have one tag attached. The previous icon view gives us little detail as to where these files are all located but we can change the view, and get an exact idea of where they are in the Finder. When you click on “All Tags…” in the Finder Sidebar, you see all the tags on your system. Note that, even if you delete the tag, the files will remain.įrom here, you can continue to add tags to your files, further categorizing them so its easy to find a specific group of files. Again, we could right-click on it and rename it, change its color, or delete it. Now, we have a new tag in the Sidebar, which when you click on it, will display every file to which we’ve attached that tag. We have added the tag “screenshots” to these six images, which is saved to the files’ metadata, so even if you transfer them to a different folder, drive, or even another Mac, you can still find these files with the “screenshots” tag.