OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Finder Tags

Finder tags offer a way to color-code, or apply a keyword to, your icons (Figure 2-9). They’re a lot like the Finder labels that have been on the Mac for decades, with a few differences:

• You can apply more than one tag to an icon, in effect letting it be in more than one place, or sortable in more than one way. A photo of Aunt Edna in her early days on the farm could be tagged Relatives, Photos, and Ancient History.

• You can have more than seven tags available; in fact, you can have dozens (although you can choose from only seven colors).

• You can create, assign, and use tags in many more ways, in many more places, than you could labels. For example, you can assign a label or two to a new document as you’re naming and saving it.

• Tags sync. That is, if you have more than one Mac, and they’re signed into the same iCloud account, the same tags are available on all your machines.

Figure 2-9. Use the File menu, menu, or shortcut menu to apply label tags to highlighted icons. You can even apply a label within an icon’s Get Info dialog box. Middle: The same menu is your opportunity to create (and simultaneously apply) a new tag. Just type it. Bottom: You can also apply a tag—or even create a new one—at the moment you’re saving a new document. Just type the new tag names into the Tags ...