I use Finder tags infrequently. I have a few specialized situations in which tags are very useful. But otherwise I don’t use them much at all. I rarely use the built-in tags; I generally make up tags to fit the situation.
I would probably use them more frequently, if the interface were better developed.
100% rely on tags in Daylite. Looking for something to MANAGE tags across all files / folders.
Absolutely, as I said when I introduced the polls to start.
Concerning the polls, the responses that bother me are the folks who respond to the poll and don’t have access to the feature. I look forward to the reactions of people who use a feature, especially one I don’t use. It opens my thinking about ways I might improve my experience. I think that most of the polls could be improved by having two extra checkmarks (“Never tried [feature].” and “[Feature] not available to me.”
Concerning tags, I don’t use them in the Finder, but I do find the somewhat related colored Mail flags to be quite helpful. I have rules, and Smart Mailboxes defined that use them quite heavily. Unfortunately, the user-defined smart object concept is only available on MacOS and not the other Apple OS’s.
I use them a lot, but I would prefer the color to apply to the whole name of a Finder item, as it once did. I suspect the reason Apple moved to the dots was so that an item could have multiple tags, but I don’t think this works all that well. For one thing, AppleScript can’t handle multiple tags. The fact that Apple still have not implemented the “label” Type in AppleScript (in Monterey, anyway) is reprehensible. Apple ignores AppleScript at its peril; it’s one of the main things that make using a Mac worth while. Shortcuts is for kiddies.
A good suggestion because that also reveals something about Apple’s marketing and how available the feature could be.
In my view would be about tags in mail which currently require a plug in that will be unavailable in Sonoma - keeping me from upgrading at this point. A product being made less useful - perhaps more secure.
I have a question for tag users.
A traditional method of organizing files, documents, etc. is to put them in separate folders and name each folder appropriately.
Has anybody tried putting everything in one folder instead and using tags to identify and categorize them? I’m curious to know how that will work.
I really love being able to use Finder Tags! I use colored tags every day to make important and most used files stand out in Finder so I can easily find them in folders containing lots of files. My folder containing info on hundreds of apps is sorted on tags in Finder, allowing me to see the alphabetically sorted apps that I actually have installed on top. I love being able to show or copy selected files in a context that is different from the one I used to save them in a particular folder, e.g. to give my wife a a folder containing just manuals of home equipment, originating from my folders that are organized differently on my Mac. Finder Tags are really marvelous when they are used with logical expressions. So for example, I can use tags to add status info and other info to series of files in one or more folders and use queries to select files based on any combination of tags (and other info like (parts of) the file name, meta info embedded in photos etc.). I agree: this advanced use of tags is difficult when using just Finder. And it used to be not very reliable (hopefully it is now). So I use HoudahSpot instead. HoudahSpot is a great file search utility that uses the existing Spotlight index and supports tags and lots of other meta info. While it’s far more powerful than Finder, it’s also much easier to use and it proved to be reliable in advanced search queries where Finder wasn’t. It makes creating logical expressions easy and shows the results while building them, drilling down on the information you are looking for. I therefore love using HoudahSpot for any advanced searching. This way, I can prevent having to build or buy applications to handle file based information, I can prevent needing duplicate files and I can prevent mistakes that are easily made when having to deal with duplicate files. All in all: I am very happy with Finder Tags!
I use them, but rarely.
I remember when tagging was added to OS X; John Siracusa had a lengthy explanation of the underlying structure: you could add not only your own tags, but entire taxonomies. I wish it were easier to do that—I could add metadata to a file to indicate client, subject matter, etc, and slice and dice my files accordingly. If you did it right, this could be very powerful.
But it also requires some extra effort, and just sticking a file in a folder as a taxonomical system is well-supported and easy.
Right. I never use them, and in fact actively banish them, because they require Mac-specific filesystem metadata that won’t sync reliably across systems and are non-portable in a way that simple hierarchy (which, in any case, I’m perfectly all right with) and searches (based on metadata that’s stored in the file itself) are.
I voted “occasionally”, because at times I don’t trust they work (maybe due to problems with past Mac OS releases and compatibility with other software).
I have two main uses:
But, as others have said, colour labels in Finder are way less useful since they were transformed in the little dot instead of the full line as in Classic (so betraying my age). For a certain period of time has been a reason to continue to pay and use for Pathfinder as a Finder replacement/companion.
I know people who attempt to do this simply by adding such tags to the Comments field in the file’s/folder’s Information panel (or through helper apps to do exactly that). That information field allows for almost unlimited user-defined tags that Spotlight will include in its searches. Now, instead of searching for file/folder name, you’ll be searching for (or saving pre-configured searches for dynamic display of) tagged items with specific tags.
I don’t use this myself, but I can see why somebody would find it very powerful.
My favorite macOS feature. Mac had been so close to file management nirvana for years and then Tags put it over the top. Key to my paperless office quest. A filing cabinet (electronic is no better than physical, really) is how to make finding files virtually impossible, it’s just a maze of folders and ridiculously long and cryptic file names. Now with Tags, along with other finder properties like names and dates, I just dump all files in one place and find them quickly.
I’ve been doing that for years. I try to be as paperless as possible.
Welcome to TidBITS Talk! Good to see someone is finding Tags useful.
I suspect that many of us, going back nearly 5 decades when Apple was “Apple Computer” and Mac was “Macintosh,” have an aversion to dumping everything into a single directory. There is the desktop/folder/file paradigm that is baked deep into the System. There is also the reality that for many iterations of what became MacOS it was impossible to put more than, say, a hundred files into a folder without experiencing major performance and reliability problems.
We have been trained away from it. We have been required to impose hierarchical organization on our files. So tagging seems more like a solution in search of a problem.
So it’s neat to see someone able to use more of a “data soup” approach to retrieving Mac information.
I used to use these apps a while back, but I thought they were dead. It looks like they’re alive and well. I probably should re-examine them.
In The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin argued that with sufficient search capabilities, there should be no need for any kind of user-visible file system, or even file names. Just big pools of documents that you identify from their content.
Raskin’s favorite product, the Canon Cat, was actually designed around this paradigm, although it was probably easier to make practical due to its limited storage capacity (256 KB per floppy disk). And you would need to provide your own organization system for tracking what was on each disk.
I personally don’t agree with this theory. Maybe because I can’t imagine “sufficient search capabilities” ever existing. Or maybe because I’ve been using files and file systems for over 40 years and I don’t want to unlearn it now.
But it is interesting to see that, at least for some people, that paradigm is working.
I don’t think I agree with it either. I’m accustomed to searching for everything in Gmail, where I almost always know some fact about the messages I want to find, but if I don’t know the search space well, I struggle. As an example of that, I have real trouble thinking of music to play using Siri on the HomePod—I find a list of artist names helpful for reminding me what I like. It’s not that I don’t know these artists, potentially well, but the list is too large for me to be able to pull out any given artist.
I think Raskin would argue that in lieu of a filename, documents should have titles (as are usually on the first page), which you can search for.
Interestingly, Apple has mostly embraced Raskin’s vision with the Music and Photos apps.
You access your music by the document (song) content - the embedded metadata (title, artist, album, etc), and you never see the actual file and have to dig a bit to get the underlying path to the file. And you don’t even need that information to share the music, since you can drag the song from the Music app to an e-mail message (or anything else that can accept a dropped file).
Photos are similar, but even more so. You see thumbnails of everything. Organized spatially (e.g. by albums) or by metadata (dates, identified people, locations), but again, the underlying file is hidden. And even moreso than with Music, because it has separate internal files for the original, thumbails, a sequence of edits and the final post-edit version, and there is no way (via the app’s GUI) to learn the actual locations of these files. But again, you don’t need that information because you can just drag/drop pictures into other apps (or export images to various formats via menu commands.)
But as a way of organizing all your files on a Mac? No, that seems like a bit too much for me.