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Tags

Tags are free-form labels on your media. Where a collection is a place you put a file, a tag is a word you attach to it — a file can carry as many as you like, and filtering by one narrows the gallery immediately.

Opening tag management​

Tags live behind the Tags button in the gallery toolbar, next to Collections. There is no separate page: a tag is metadata about your library, not a place to navigate to.

What opens depends on what you have selected:

SelectionWhat opensWhat you can do
NothingThe tag managerCreate, rename, merge, delete, share
One fileThe tag editorAdd tags, and remove them as chips
Several filesBulk applyAdd a tag to all of them

With files selected, Tags also appears in the Organize menu beside Add to collection — both attach metadata to a file.

Why several files is add-only​

With one file selected you see its tags as chips and can remove any of them. With several, the chips are read-only and show their coverage instead — on 3 of 5. Removing a tag that sits on three of five files has no single obvious meaning, while adding one does. Long lists are capped, with and N more tags carrying the rest.

Creating and applying tags​

Type a name in the manager's New tag field, or in the editor when files are selected. Names resolve to an existing tag whenever one matches: matching ignores case, hyphens, underscores and repeated spaces, so Q3 Review, q3-review and q3_review are all the same tag rather than three near-duplicates.

A near match is never applied automatically. Typing q4-earnings when q3-earnings exists creates a new tag, because nothing can split two tags apart once they are combined. The auto-labeler is the one exception — it may attach a close match on its own, and those tags show Added by AI in the Origin column.

Finding a tag​

The manager's tools combine:

  • Search narrows the list as you type.
  • Sort by most-used or by name.
  • Views — All, Unused (no file you can see carries it), and Collisions (tags that normalize to the same name, grouped with a suggested survivor).
  • Tag ownership filters by who the tag belongs to (below).

Ownership: who can change a tag​

Every tag reports one of three states, which is also what the Tag ownership filter selects on:

StateWhat it meansWhat you can do
(unmarked) — MineYou created itRename, merge, delete, share
SharedPart of the shared vocabulary every account seesFilter and apply; only an admin can change it
Shared with meBelongs to someone elseFilter and apply; only they can change it

Tag names are unique per person, so you and a colleague can each have an interview tag without colliding. Where a tag is not yours to change, the manager does not offer Rename or Delete — the badge explains why.

Sharing a tag​

Share… gives a tag to specific people or groups. They can see it, filter by it and apply it — so they use your word instead of coining a duplicate — while renaming, merging and deleting stay with you. Revoking a share leaves every file tagged; only reaching the tag by name in the picker goes away.

Share with everyone (admin only) publishes a tag into the shared vocabulary and folds other people's identically-named tags into it, so the deployment converges on one Interview instead of accumulating one per person. Their files keep the tag.

Every install also seeds a small shared vocabulary — Important, Meeting, Interview, Personal — and typing one of those names attaches the shared tag rather than forking a private copy.

Tags on shared media​

Tags travel with the media they are on. Share a collection and its files' tags become visible to everyone you shared with: on the file's detail page, in their tag picker, in the gallery filter, and in search.

Nothing is copied. Visibility is worked out from the file each time, which means:

  • Tagging a shared file later shows up for recipients immediately.
  • Unsharing removes those tags from their list again, with no cleanup step.
  • Usage counts only ever count files you can see, so a shared tag never reveals how much its owner uses it elsewhere.

A recipient tagging the same file with a word already on it attaches the existing tag rather than creating a second one, so a shared file never carries the same word twice.

Renaming, merging and deleting​

Select a tag to see what it touches: its usage, its origin, and the files carrying it, each clickable through to the file.

Rename, merge and delete each show what they would touch before they act, including a count of files beyond the ones you can see — a shared tag can reach further than your own library. Deletes use the same confirmation dialog as the rest of the app.

Renaming to a name that already belongs to another tag is a merge, and says so before applying anything. Merging is the least reversible action here, so when you merge a collision cluster the surviving name is always chosen explicitly.

Filtering by a tag and searching for it return the same files. If they ever disagree after a large merge, the search index refresh is still catching up; it converges on its own.