Finder Tags and Colors Changed (Deleted) by El Capitan

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.

I have the same problem!!!

I'm furious!

Except it didnt happen immediately, it happened about a week after the upgrade.

I work with a ton a of pictures and distribute them according to the color tags. Multiple colors tell me where I ve already distributed them.

Now I haven't a clue!!!!

It kept the most recently added color tag, and deleted all the previous ones!!!

EDIT

Well, this is strange.

I tried to add another tag and after just doing that all the previous multiple tags showed up. So its not deleting them, its not showing them correctly.

Same thing when I tried to upload with Safari. First time I tried to upload it only showed the last added tag. Then I closed the upload window, opened it up again and now it shows the multiple tags. But it has to be done with every single folder, as if every folder needed to be re-initialized by Finder for it to properly see the tags.

I'll try a restart.

Unfortunately the problem continues. I have a 13-inch Mid-2013 MacBook Air, upgraded online from Yosemite.

Another problem is that the system seems to be "forgetful" system-wide.

Examples:

- Finder doesn't remember the last windows size and position

- Numbers, Pages won't list the most recent documents as such, even though I haven't closed the program

Possibly related to not displaying the color tags properly.

I have just upgraded to El Capitan and found the same problem - custom tags were gone, a generic (color) tag appeared instead. It seems to be a problem with wrong data cached somewhere in the finder. The lost tags are not really gone and can be restored as long as the wrong data is not made persistent.

Finder must be forced to restore the original tag information. This happens if a file is duplicated within a directory, then the original tags are restored. Further, all tags of all files in that directory are restored. The same happens if the files are sorted by tags.

Stay away from the "Get Info..." and the "Edit Tags" commands, as these will delete the original tag information and persistently store the wrong information.

I'll file a bug for apple.

Regards, Andreas

What's worse, the tagging system is fundamentally broken, and these seemed to have gone completely unnoticed by apple. I sent them an email months ago to no avail. Namely: You can no longer assign multiple tags at once.

Example: Imagine you had 100's of movies, each labeled with identifying tags, such as year, genre, actors, directors, rating, who it is for (yourself, spouse, children, etc.) Then you decide, to add 25 more movies "Cartoons" for the kiddos. Well, sorry pal, but you have to do each one individually now. Why? Because if you make the mistake of assuming it worked like Mavericks, then all 25 movies that you highlight will have IDENTICAL TAGS. Not just an identical TAG (singular), no...rather EVERY TAG of EVERY HIGHLIGHTED FILE will be duplicated to EVERY MOVIE/FILE.

Example: 5 files

1 : sky

2: ocean

3: grass

4: rock

5: desert

Highlight all of them, and add tag "Earth"

In Mavericks:

1 : sky, Earth

2: ocean, Earth

3: grass. Earth

4: rock, Earth

5: desert, Earth

Makes sense. Now lets see what happens in El Crapitan:

1: sky, ocean, grass, rock, desert, Earth

2: sky, ocean, grass, rock, desert, Earth

3: sky, ocean, grass, rock, desert, Earth

4: sky, ocean, grass, rock, desert, Earth

5: sky, ocean, grass, rock, desert, Earth

Well, isn't that just a load of crap. Thanks apple, for having me invest countess hours buying into your tagging system, and organizing my entire system with appropriate smart folders to keep things efficient, only to completely and unequivocally break the feature one update later. Awesome....

Thanks for your discussion, as a result, I won't upgrade till it is fixed

As a workaround, you can select from the Contextual menu or File menu, but you would have to have the one you want to use in the Favorites.

So, I guess you have to work out the tradeoff between making the new tag a Favorite and individually tagging each file.

I sent them an email months ago to no avail.

Using the Bug Reporter may be a little more productive. You can register for a free developer account (here: https://developer.apple.com/) which will give you access to the the bug reporter at bugreport.apple.com

I have no words. I just sent the two bugs to the apple bug reporter both the apparent loss of tags after upgrade and the multiple tagging problem described wonderfully by Silent_Knight

I hope both are fixed soon.

I add a screenshot, it helps illustrate the mystery problem of disappearing tags:

I think I may have discovered the answer for me, at least.

Mine was set to View/Arrange By/Kind. When i switched to Arrange By/Name, they all appeared again.

I have the same problem here. All my tags just disappeared one after the other. Now just orange is left and working.... The others are "invisible"?!?! When is this gonna be fixed cause thats really a problem for anyone working with a system.

I am having the same issue that Silent_Knight described in terms of tags being improperly propogated to ALL selected files. Thanks for the precise description. Very much hoping that there's a fix for this. I can't see anyone prefering the way it works now. What a bummer.

I recently bought a new iMac with El Capitan. I'm a bit confused since I was working on Leopard and Snow Leopard macs using "Labels" which would designate a color and by default the colors would be assigned a number. Red = 1, Orange = 2, etc. You can change the name Red to "Important" or whatever, but as long as you left the Colors in the same order they would not move unless you wanted them to. My issue is that I used to just organize files inside folders by these default color. A Red Labeled file (now a "Tag" in El Capitan) would be first up top in a folder followed by Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Gray. But it no longer gives you the option to organize the colors or leave them in the original default order I described. The former OS would allow you to move them in the order they were suppose to show up in folders. My tags (formerly Labels) are mixed up as follows: Yellow, Red, Purple, Orange, Green, Gray, Blue. There is no way of changing the order at all so thousands of files are all organized incorrectly. That's 10 years amount of work for me. It's not life or death for me, but it's really annoying and if I wanted to organize them correctly I think it would take me years which I don't plan to redo. Bummer. The OS is an improvement, but this part is a glitch unless it has to do with the Labels and Tags being somewhat incompatible because of the drastic OS leap.

In the middle shot you are arranging which uses the name of the Tag. In the third shot, you are sorting and I have no idea on what the OS chose.

The numbers have always been out of order with respect to the colors show in your first screen shot. I looked at a few index numbers in El Capitan and they are Orange: 1, Red:2, Yellow:3, Blue:4, Purple:5, Green: 6, Gray:7, and None:0. I don't have an old OS to look at the label color index number to verify that is the same. However, they don't appear to use that in either sorting or arranging.

There's obviously something wrong as the two should have the same order.