I hate the new tags in Mavericks, need coloured folders!!

Good work, and I'm sure they will give it serious consideration after it's four year absence, whatever Color Folders were.

Good luck as we step into a 5th year without them. I would think the latest generation of Mac users will never have even heard of them.

Cheers for Christmas

Pete

Tell you what: Posting all of this here is pointless. Apple don't promise to read any of it. Send Feedback. They do read that:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

Here is my response to a similar posting by Speedo108:

"It's my understanding that color labeling titles of files and folders no longer works in Maverick the way it has in previous versions of the operating system. Small colored, sometime overlapping, circles indicating the tags added to the folder/file have replaced the complete coloring of the name of the file, if I understood your question. I have not downloaded Mavericks out of concern about how it will handle all the labels and tags I've already assigned my thousands of files/folders, and am getting this information from review of several Mac sites and this forum, so take anything I say with a grain of salt."

I can't agree more. These new tags are just a poor version of the colour labels used in previous systems. I use them continually to show me the progress of files through design, checking, editing, etc. Orange for read, purple for corrected, green for uploaded, etc. The file names can't be changed or the folders or all the links change so colour is perfect.

Now I have dots which are not nearly as easy to see as the whole name in colour. People who use the colours regularly usually have a colour for a process. Clicking on them in the side bar now brings up every occurence of that tag/colour on the whole computer. Yeah like that's going to work.

I also find it extremely annoying not having a no colour button. To remove a colour/tag you have to go back to the original colour and it works like an on/off button. So if I have a set of files in different colours I have to click on each colour to remove it. Before I could select the lot and click on no colour.

Most of the functionality of the colour labels is gone with these tags.

I also find it extremely annoying not having a no colour button. To remove a colour/tag you have to go back to the original colour and it works like an on/off button. So if I have a set of files in different colours I have to click on each colour to remove it. Before I could select the lot and click on no colour.

To remove a tag just delete it from the list. If that Tag is in the contextual menu list, you can "uncheck" it, but if it is not, select Tags... or use the Tags button to show the list and remove the ones you don't want.

You can edit your "Favorite" tags in Finder Preferences:

As to the original question. No, I sincerely doubt Apple will change it back. They may modify it to add more color, like the old Label, but it wouldn't have a consistency when you had more than one Tag.

For all practical matters they just removed the 'Labels' functionality, which was extremely powerful in the way it combined data with visual feedback. These tiny color buttons on the right make absolutely no graphic sense. I wonder how they made it past Jonathan Ive.

I do hope they come back.

I completely agree. Between how small the dots are and how far away they are placed from the file names makes them practically useless (if they were placed to the left of the file name even, it would be more helpful).

I used them to mark a folder for ease of finding it among hundreds of other folder or file. I also used them similarly to lclcv, and used different colors to show progress. I'm so glad I only uploaded Mavericks onto my personal computer. If it had been on my work computer it would have destroyed my work process.

Most changes I can get used to, but this is a biggie.

The "visual feedback" for Tags is to select the Tags and the OS will display all things tagged with that Tag.

You can select them in the Sidebar and the window will show all items with that tag. If you select All Tags... in the sidebar, it will show another column with all of the defined tags. However, you can only choose one tag at a time.

[Barney: that is not visual feedback, that is data sorting or filtering. Visual feedback is glancing at a bunch of open windows with maybe hundreds of files sorted in each by date, size, name, whatever, and being able to immediately pick the file you are after. If you used labels you know what I mean.]

Hence the "scare" quotes. I can't change the OS. Nobody here can. We can only offer workarounds.

And no, I never used Labels as I had no use for them. Now Tags, those are great. Multiple, overlapping, descriptive organizational keywords.

[Now I get your quotes.]

Sure tags are great. But they are a different tool, doing a different thing. Confusing the two (which is what Apple just did by merging the two into one) is extremely unApplelike.

Welcome to the Support Communities.

Madashelluphere wrote:

These new circle thingees are too small and barely noticable.

You can let Apple know via this form:

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

I have to agree: I hate the new labels. I had things grouped together: for example, all my biology folders were green, all my research folders were blue... Now I can hardly see those dumb dots. I think this would be a good option for some people, but the old, full colored files should be an optional view. The new label system has made navigating through my files very difficult. Sorry, but two thumbs down.

Thank you, Alancito. I just used your link!