This is really great. The OS does not need to do everything itself. It needs to provide the features that third-party applications can tie into to provide the functionality. This is where iOS being so locked down creates a major hindrance. As it stands, it falls on iOS to be able to do everything we users want. I get the security issues and having a locked down system really does mitigate a lot of the security problems. The smart engineers at Apple need to figure out how to maintain the secure environment and still allow programmers and users the freedom they need to get their work done using the methods and tools they prefer.
I’m a late responder because I found this topic after responding to @JoelAnderson’s great post in a more recent topic and then looking at Joel’s other top posts.
This has been a much-needed feature in Finder. For now I do it in Leap.app, where it’s easy to do such multiple operations with tags.
This used to be possible in Finder. In Mavericks, you could do a Spotlight search from the Finder toolbar, with the search scope set to the whole computer, and the search results would include items in Mail (and I think most of the other Apple apps), which could then be tagged and would appear in subsequent searches for that tag with the search scope set to the whole computer (or in saved searches for the same). So this feature request is, in part, request for a “feature resurrection”!
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AND and OR of tags in Spotlight can be done. It doesn’t seem to be 100% reliable because typing in the search field can be tricky! It seems to be more reliable if you make sure to use “tag:” and not have it substitute a tag token. Also is problematic if the tags are more than one word.
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Thanks, @tomalmy: I knew about AND / OR / NOT operators in Spotlight, but I failed to mention it, so thanks for that follow-up note.
What is cool about Leap.app, as you may know, is that you can add tags to the search by clicking on them in the tag cloud, and the tag cloud shows only the tags in the current search scope, so since the search scope changes each time you add a tag, the tag cloud changes to show only the remaining available tags. You can navigate to a particular folder, easily exclude certain subfolders from the search scope, and see a tag cloud of only the tags in that particular folder but not the excluded subfolders. That kind of sophisticated tag-viewing/searching logic would be great to have in the Finder, as @JoelAnderson suggested. Fortunately we already have Leap.app.
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Send this to Apple Feedback daily, maybe some of the ideas will be implemented.
None of mine have, and I resubmit them to Apple on a schedule. I think they have blocked my email address by now.