Fortunately, Finder has a handy trick up its sleeve by way of tags. Tags allow you to not only tag files with categories but also make it possible for you to gain quick access to the tags you use the most. I’m going to show you how to use the tag feature in Finder. I’ll be demonstrating with macOS Monterey, but you should be able to make use of the feature even in earlier incarnations of macOS. Let’s see how this is done.
Creating your first tag
1. Open Finder Preferences
Open Finder in macOS and then click Finder > Preferences. You should see a list of tags in the resulting window (Figure 1).
2. Add a new tag
Click + near the bottom and then (at the top of the Tags listing) give the new tag a name (Figure 2). Create as many tags as you need. Before you close the Finder Preferences window, make sure to click the checkbox associated with the new tag so it will show up in the Finder sidebar.
Tagging a file
1. Locate the file
Now that you’ve created your first tag and made sure it was visible in the Finder sidebar let’s tag a file. The first thing you must do is locate the file to be tagged in Finder.
2. Adding a tag to a file
Once you’ve located the file to be tagged, two-finger tap (or right mouse click) the file and, from the popup menu (Figure 3), click Tags. A new popup will appear (Figure 4), where you can assign tags to the new file. Select any/all tags you want to assign to the file, and then click out of the popup to dismiss it.
Viewing a tagged file
Viewing tagged files is as simple as clicking the associated tag in the Finder sidebar, which will reveal any files that belong to the tag in question (Figure 5). And that’s all there is to using the macOS Finder Tags feature. When you have a lot of files on your hard drive, and you need to be able to locate them quickly, this feature will go a long way to making that happen.
