My tags are not populating when selected from the sidebar
My Tags do not work. I have large volumes of tags but when i select the tag from my sidebar nothing populates. Help?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.5
The ability of the individual tags in the Finder Window side bar is dependent upon proper Spotlight indexing and if they are enabled in Finder Settings > Tags panel. Each of the standard or custom-named tags need to be enabled with a visible check mark:
No tags will appear on mounted drives that have not been indexed by Spotlight, but will appear on iCloud Drive.
I am using macOS 26.5.2 and any one of my custom tagged (including those with multiple tags) filesystem objects are found with the Finder Window Tags listing. My usual approach for finding tagged documents or folders is using a Spotlight search, not the Finder Window side bar. The following Spotlight query finds any Pages document that has either or both tags on it:
kind:pages AND (tag:unique OR tag:salient)
In German language speaking countries, one must use a raw query instead of tag (which conflicts with day):
kind:pages AND (kMDItemUserTags:unique OR kMDItemUserTags:salient)