Q: Finder color tags not working

Same problem here. The Tags are not displayed in the Finder. I am able to tag documents, but the Tags are not displayed on left side bar in the Finder.

I am not able to "activate" and have the list of tags displayed.

Why is this so difficult?

Well I can see tags from all the files I had tagged before I installed Mavericks - and they are on an external server - but if I try and make a new tag, the coloured button shows up for a few seconds then disappears but if I change the view to 'tags' it shows the new tagged file as tagged.

When I tag a file on an external drive or on my Mac however, it stays visible.

Not sure how Apple can make something that is simple and works easily into something that is complicated and doesn't work.

Is anyone from Apple listening to this?

Sir Mary ~ Welcome to the Support Communities.

Sir_Mary wrote:

 

Is anyone from Apple listening to this?

Not here — we're all just users like yourself. Apple will listen to your feedback about OS X here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Thanks Alancito - I've now contacted them as this doesn't look like something anyone apart from Apple can resolve.

I'm unsure if this is still a problem for you but my issue was resolved by re-indexing the volume I was having troubles with. I would assume this should fix everyone in this thread's problems.

Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

i have the same problem. tag colors doesn't work on the server. anyone have answer? please.

Recently Finder tags stopped working for me too. Re-indexing helps for a little while but then the problem soon comes back. By the way, it's not related to the location of files in any way. I'm on Yosemite, MBP (late 2011). Actually Finder seems quite a bit buggy lately, and I often have to relaunch Finder to get it working properly. Unfortunately that doesn't solve the tags issue...

Edit: just found out that searching for tags in spotlight does work, while clicking in the sidebar reveals no files.

Finder tags need Spotlight to work, so I'm guessing you might have it disabled for some reason.

To re-enable Spotlight, you'll have to do so from the terminal using the mdutil command:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

or try:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

If in case you do run across the error "Operation is already in progress", then follow the instructions at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6794027?tstart=0

I had a similar problem.  In any directory display the tags did appear on the left hand side but without the name tags I had given them  They would not display the corresponding files either.  I checked spotlight but it was fully enabled.

Here's what I did that solved the problem.  I picked a random file on my desktop, right clicked it and then the named tags appeared in the info panel.  I assigned the random file to each of the tags.  When I went back to a directory display all my named tags were back but without the right colours.  All I had to do was reset the colours.  The original tag associations to files that I had set up returned!  Later I removed the tag associations from the random file.  This solution was based on luck!!!

This worked .... but WHY do we have to do things like this with such a sophisticated OS??????