can i prevent sharing of tags between two macs?

Unfortunately, it's worse than I thought even. After your response I did an experiment. The Tags settings on one mac are immediately synced with the other. So if I choose tags A and B on my personal mac, those are now the only ones selected for the sidebar on my work mac and all the ones on the work mac are no longer selected. The "recently used" tag was not selected.

I have to say this is the most disappointing thing I've come across on the mac in as long as I can remember. I was anxiously awaiting Tags and immediately applied them to all of my files and have finally gotten to a point where I can reliably search for files without a visually looking thru a million non-relevant ones. Now this will put a limit on how much I can use them. I don't want 25 work tags on my personal mac and 25 personal tags on work mac and now have to sort thru 50 tags on each. And on my ipad as well. Also means I can't use the tags in the sidebar feature at all.

I can understand if I actually have files on my mac that use a particular tag that the mac will now include it. But not when not a single file on the mac is using the tag from another mac. I'll submit a request to Apple to have them consider a setting to disable the full sync of tags.

Thanks for the response. I understand when individual files but in my case I have not transferred any files to my personal mac yet, nor have I set up any tags on this mac. But now I have all the tags that I set up on my work mac showing in the finder of my personal mac...they are all there on Finder window sidebars and if I look at Finder preferences, all the work mac tags are list there as well.

like you, I keep all work and personal files fully separate on each mac which is why the tags I have won't really ever overlap. I do use common Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Keychain though.

Not sure what you mean about Work and Home. Just Tag names? If so, then I'm right back where I used to be in terms of finding files. I need a lot of tags, but all different ones between the macs. I do a lot of webex and have my work mac projected in meetings, even when looking thru the Finder. I don't find it very professional to have my personal tags displayed in those situations...

anyway, I appreciate your responses

Those appear to be just regular Tags. I thought Viking was saying there is a category to specify if a tag is home or work. I deleted the Work and Home ones when I set up my tags as those are too generic for my purposes.

Where can I specify those categories? I've looked thru all the Finder preference options and don't see where I can make that selection