Mela1987

Q: Finder Tags and Colors Changed (Deleted) by El Capitan

I have upgraded three MacBook Airs and Pros to El Capitan from Yosemite this week and have just realized a critical problem on all of them. The upgrade has caused all custom Finder Tags to revert to generic color-based finder tags and erased all the custom terms.

 

I had many customs tags, but for example I was using the tag "payable" that had been assigned the color red, "paid" that was assigned the color green, and "reimbursable" that was using the color yellow. All three of those tags were also set to appear in the Finder sidebar. After the upgrade to El Capitan, the tags listed in the Finder sidebar have reverted to the color-based default tags and none of the custom tags appear. Furthermore, when I look at the tags on the files that were formerly tagged "payable" and were red, they are still red, but now the tag is simply "Red". The "payable" tag is gone. Similarly, files tagged "paid" have reverted to being tagged just "Green" and files tagged "reimbursable" have reverted to just "Yellow".

 

I had multiple custom tags that had colors assigned, so now all the distinctions of custom tags has been lost, and I simply have bunches of files tagged "Red", "Yellow", "Green", etc. that are indistinguishable as to what their custom tags used to be.

 

Essentially, the whole Finder Tag system has been broken by the upgrade, all files have lost their tags, and all workflows based on file tags are now useless.

 

Has anyone else seen this problem and is there anything to do about it?

 

Thanks,

Drew

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 9, 2015 10:52 AM

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Q: Finder Tags and Colors Changed (Deleted) by El Capitan

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  • by rabidart,

    rabidart rabidart Mar 21, 2016 10:34 PM in response to Barney-15E
    Level 1 (22 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 21, 2016 10:34 PM in response to Barney-15E

    The middle shot looks like the order is alphabetical: Blue, Gray, Green, etc.

     

    I think the thing was that in the older OS's I was able to make the order Red, Orange, Yellow, etc. (colors of the rainbow) and then Gray.

    Perhaps if I change the names of the tag's instead of names...into numbers....

     

    You know what...I think that is what I did with the older system...I changed the names to numbers and it fixed my issue.

    I'll try that later tonight... It's been 10 years since I did this so I think I forgot about it.

     

    Thanks Barney. I'm pretty hopeful (nearly certain) this is the fix for me.

  • by rabidart,

    rabidart rabidart Mar 22, 2016 4:03 PM in response to rabidart
    Level 1 (22 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 22, 2016 4:03 PM in response to rabidart

    No the problems still persist. I was hoping this would solve the issue. Unless you "Arrange By: Tag" and "Sort By: Tag" my preferences aren't taking. In another preference selection "Arrange By: None" and "Sort By: Tag" the tags are organized differently like I've mentioned before. So numbering my tags is not working entirely, but only if you use "Arrange By: Tag" and "Sort By: Tag" It may be due to a clash of "label" and "tag" from my previous OS environment. I'm probably missing something, but so far it seems it may be due to this clash of decades old labelling/tagging.

  • by tupuni,

    tupuni tupuni Apr 28, 2016 8:30 PM in response to Mela1987
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apr 28, 2016 8:30 PM in response to Mela1987

    I had the same problem but just found that when you go to "all tags" your previous configuration appears again. Then you just need to 1/assign the right color to the previously named tags, 2/ put them back to the side bar, and 3/ erase the new color name tags

    I hope that helps!

    d.png

  • by rabidart,

    rabidart rabidart Apr 28, 2016 10:14 PM in response to tupuni
    Level 1 (22 points)
    Mac OS X
    Apr 28, 2016 10:14 PM in response to tupuni

    Hi and thanks for replying. I still have the same problem though I see what you are saying. I was able to find all those old tags. I never made tags named more than "Red" "Orange" "Yellow" etc. I wanted to keep things simple so I was able to edit those into 1 (for Red) 2 (for Orange) 3 (for Yellow) etc.

    If you open them up under view options "Arrange by: Tags and Sort by: Name" yes they are all organized according to the numbers/alphabetical (1 (for Red) 2 (for Orange) 3 (for Yellow) etc.), but if in Finder you open up a folder in "Icon" mode and you change the view options to "Arrange by: None and Sort by: Tags" typically you should see them arrange in the same sort of order with "1 = Red" being first, but instead 3 = Yellow always comes out first under ICON VIEW.

    This is weird because in my older computer it would come out the order I mentioned in my previous posts. RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN...etc. Like the Rainbow...but instead in El Capitan under ICON VIEW it comes out YELLOW, RED, ORANGE, PURPLE, GREEN. GREY, BLUE...very weird.

    Every other VIEW Option works out like it should, but I can't get the right tag order in ICON View for some reason.

     

     

  • by Claire Voskuhl,

    Claire Voskuhl Claire Voskuhl Jul 10, 2016 2:40 PM in response to Mela1987
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Jul 10, 2016 2:40 PM in response to Mela1987

    I just upgraded to El Capitan this week and have discovered that my tags had apparently disappeared. I did find them listed and attached to the files/folders I had assigned them to when I looked at "Tags," but the colors were gone and the tags themselves were not visible on the folders or files. I finally discovered that if I went to Finder/Preferences/Tags I could reassign the colors to the tags and they reappeared with Folders and Files. Hope this helps with some of the problems.

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