One of the updates that was touted with the coming of Mavericks are Tags. Tags can be used for both files and folders. When you first open up the Finder window, the tags are in the side bar. To change a name of a tag, hit Control click and then hit the Rename option. You can also change a name by going up to Preferences and then Tags and click on the name.

Only six tags will show up when you Control click on an item. These are your favorite tags. To change your favorite tags, in the Finder Window go up to Preference than Tags and drag the tags you want into the box at the bottom. To remove a tag from the sidebar simply control click on the tag and hit remove tag. This will just remove the tag from the sidebar, if you want to delete the tag altogether hit control click and then delete tag. You will get a warning that this will remove the tag altogether, so make sure that is what you want.

When you save an item, you are given the option to tag the item. You can either tag it with an existing tag or add a new tag. There is a couple of ways to add a tag to an existing item. The first is to highlight the item in the Finder Window and then click on the symbol in the tool bar that has the circle in the rounded rectangle and add the tag. You can also highlight the item hit Command I to pull up the information screen and tab down to the Add tag block and add the tag. To search for items with a specific tag you can enter the tag in the Finder search window or pick it from the sidebar. Strangely you can’t search for tags using Spotlight, maybe that will come in the future. It will be interesting to see how much tags are used. Some people have to have everything in a specific file or folder or they feel unorganized. I use to be that way, but the problem I ran into was I am terrible at name things and then remembering what I named them. By using tags I know longer have to worry about this, I simply search for an item by the tag. Personally I think I will be using the new tagging option, what about you.