While Windows 11/10 has a powerful search inbuilt into the system, especially with Cortana which allows you to search smartly using filters like music, images, PDF and so on. One of the most underrated, but efficient way to search files easily is using TAGS. Its a feature in Windows available from a very long time, but not much used.In this post, I am going to talk about how you can use Tags to quickly find files which are important to you and use it with Cortana search box to make it even better.What are Tags in WindowsThese are metadata which can be associated with files, and they are part of Properties. Windows Search indexes Properties, which makes it possible for these tags to be searched.Why should You be using Tags? When the different type of files fall into multiple categories, and projects, and belongs to multiple persons, tags make sense. You can keep them organized into different folders, but when you put tags, you see them in one window.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined')ez_ad_units.push([[728,90],'thewindowsclub_com-medrectangle-4','ezslot_2',815,'0','0']);__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-thewindowsclub_com-medrectangle-4-0');How to TAG files in Windows 11/10Select a file, right-click, and open Properties.Switch to Details tab, and look for property Tags.Select the empty place right beside it, and it will convert to the text box.Here you can input one or multiple tags. In case you want to add multiple tags, add a semicolon between each of them.Once done, hit enter and click on OK button.If you use Microsoft Office, you can add tags to word files on the fly while saving it. Open the Office document > Info tab and you will see the Properties there.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined')ez_ad_units.push([[728,90],'thewindowsclub_com-box-4','ezslot_3',826,'0','0']);__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-thewindowsclub_com-box-4-0');You will be able to easily add Tags here.How to add Tags to Multiple FilesUsing CTRL key, select multiple files within the same directory.Right click > Properties > Details tab.Add your tags just like above, and then click OK.All those tags will be applied to those files.How to Search for Files using TagsThat was the tough part, but searching is much easier. Windows 10 Indexing works almost instantly, and to search files with the tags you added to them, just type in Cortana Search box, and switch to Documents tag. Cortana does offer Document filtered search as soon as you click the search box.While the search result is pretty quick, if you have tones of the file with similar tags, you should make use of the Filter option. Here you can narrow down your search results by type. It supports file types like Image, Folder, Emails, Person, Setting, Videos, Apps and so on.You can also use a free File Tagging Software for Windows 11/10 to better manage your files.Which File Formats are supported for Tags?The sad thing about Windows tags is they are limited to very few formats like images, Office documents and so on. So when you right-click on PDF files or a text file, you will not see an option to add tags. But you can use File Meta Association Manager to enable Tags for unsupported files.TIP: You can rename and tag music files quickly with TagScanner.
How to TAG files in Windows 10 use it to make File Search efficient
You might question that why to use the tags if you can easily organize the files in Folders? Since a file can have multiple tags, it makes it easier to tag them rather than copy them in a different folder and increase the redundancy.
In File Explorer, if you search for a file with its tag in the same folder where it is present, you can directly type the tag in the search bar, and the search result will show the files with that tag.
If practiced regularly, tagging can be very useful in organizing the files on Windows. The reason tag is highly unpopular is because it is limited to only a few file formats. Another reason is Windows search is already very efficient in finding the files with just their names, so users rarely require tags for that. However, if you need to quickly find a group of files from the clutter, tagging can be a great boon.
The same concept applies to folders. It is not helpful to have a bunch of folders called Invoices inside other folders. It would be better to call the folder ABCCorp Invoices (even if it is inside a master ABCCorp folder) so that you can use that name to search on later. It makes it much faster and easier to get to with the keyboard.
For more in-depth training on file organization and file search, make sure to check out our training courses inside The Productivity Academy, our exclusive members-only community that is jam-packed with trainings, courses, masterclasses, podcasts, coaching calls, action plans, and productivity-focused individuals just like you.
Naming conventions and fewer digital folders works best for me. For paper, I love Freedom Filer (pre-purchased or DIY). Filing papers in either hanging folders or in binders according to how long they are KEPT is their brilliant idea. Permanent (until something dies or is sold), Archive (keep forever or until no longer needed for taxes), Frequently Accessed (Action/supplies/Reference), Remove-Replace (so only the current insurance policy or lease or contact list or loan papers etc. are in that designated file), Topical/Interests, General Financial and Tax-related. Within those categories, there are often odd-year and even-year sets, or other intervals like year 0- year 9, or even month/odd month, etc. to partition files and know when you want to review/toss items on a schedule based on legal requirements or your own convenience. I suppose the same process could be applied digitally with tags and/or naming conventions.
This is a great article and very helpful especially for the people who just started working from home due to pandemic. For your physical documents, you can also make your office files safe against children who like to draw in every piece of paper that they see. You can store them in a locking document bags where you can see here: -document-bags-1115/. You can also see fire-resistant and water-resistant bags there.
This quite lengthy article explains and discusses the built-in file tagging implementation of Microsoft Windows 10. I do have a strong background with PIM and tagging and this article is written from the human perspective when manually tagging user-generated files. Please do read my general recommendations on using tags in an efficient way.
TL;DR: Microsoft Windows does provide NTFS features to tag arbitrary files. Some applications do also merge format-specific tags with these NTFS tags. Although there are quite nice retrieval functions for tags, it is very complicated to use this for general file management. Applied tags are easily lost so that in practice, users will refrain from using native Windows file tagging like this.
For this article, I am talking about non-collaborative local file-tagging. This describes the process of attaching one or more unique keywords to files stored on NTFS file systems by users who are able to access the file with granted write-permissions via the Windows File Explorer. "Keywords" and "tags" are used as synonyms here.
By default, the Windows UI does not expose anything at all that would help the users to recognize the file tagging possibility. So we do have a more or less full support for tagging files and yet Microsoft hides this quite well from the common eye. Probably for a good reason, which we are going to find out below.
When you go through different files, you will recognize that not all file types can be tagged by default. For example, the details pane for a simple text file does not show the "Tags: Add a tag" in contrast to any JPEG image file as shown in the screen-shots above.
Now that we have tagged some files, what possibilities are there to use this meta-data in daily life? First of all, there is navigation. For navigating through your files, you might prefer your File Explorer sorted alphabetically by file name:
Since the order of files in the "sorted by tags"-view is depending on the order of tags within the files, I do not consider this a great improvement. However, what is really neat is when you consider the "Group by"-method. Be default, File Explorer is grouping by names:
Untagged files are listed in the "Unspecified" category at the bottom. The categories above correspond to the alphabetically sorted list of tags. Each file is listed once for each tag. So if a file like JPEG file 3.jpg does have two different tags ("Dogs" and "House"), it is listed twice. One time in the category "Dogs" and one time in the category "House". If you select it in one category, this single file gets selected in all categories.
You will notice that all files are listed in the results that do feature the tag "house" or "House". So search as well as "Group by Tags" is case insensitive when it comes to tags. All other files, not having the "house" tag, are omitted.
On the negative side, you can not search for keywords that only occur within tags. I would have expected a query language according to the widespread pattern like "tag:dog" which would look for the occurrence of "dog" but only within the tags and not the file name or the content.
This File Explorer tag search is not a sub-string search: if you want to find files tagged with "mydog", you can not find them by searching for "dog". However, when you have tagged files with "my dog", you will find them in the search results for "dog" but not within search results for "dogs".
When you select multiple tagged files, the Details pane shows only the tags that can be found within all selected files. The other ones are not visualized. You may add additional tags which then gets added to all selected files:
This page mentions a context menu function to export the meta-data of selected files to an xml file. Meta-data from an xml file could be applied to the files as well. I was not able to find this function in my tests. 2ff7e9595c
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