Get all tags available

[andy4222]

Is there a way to find all the available tags in the file system? If not, would be good to surface them via automation tasks. Right now, if we add a new tag, we have to add the tag in the finder and also in Alfred.

[vitor]

Apple does not provide an API to retrieve your custom tags, so if you want that to be supported, use the Feedback Assistant app to ask them to provide such a method. The more people do it, the likelier it is to be implemented.

 

Previous conversation.

[zeitlings]

Perhaps there is an option... You could recursively traverse the entire file system and collect all the tags that way 😄

[zeitlings]

Not an automation task and I'm not sure how you would use it in the, I assume, Label Color Tag workflow, but you could get the tags like this:

 

mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents "kMDItemUserTags=*" | xargs -I{} mdls -name kMDItemUserTags {} | sed -e 's/kMDItemUserTags = (//; s/)//' -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' -e '/^$/d' | tr -d ',"' | sort | uniq

 

 

Depending on how many tagged files you have on your system, this may take a while. To search the entire filesystem, you can replace ~/Documents with just ~, which could take quite a long while.

 

To have a continuous stream of (unfiltered) tags, you can try this in the terminal to make sure that it works:

mdfind -onlyin ~ "kMDItemUserTags=*" | xargs -I{} mdls -name kMDItemUserTags {} | sed -e 's/kMDItemUserTags = (//; s/)//' -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' -e '/^$/d' -e 's/\"//g' -e 's/\,//'

 

Press ctrl+C to stop the process.