No, you may not see folders this way :-<

I have just discovered this behavior. I have Tags at the Finder level that I use to help move effectively to “active”, “post”, and “due” content among others. I often tag folders with these tags. I keep the important tags in my Finder Sidebar.

I just discovered that most* apps do not allow you to see tagged folders in their Open File dialogs.

  • Create a tag called “test”
  • Put the tag in your sidebar
  • Label a folder or two with the tag
  • Try TextEdit and Numbers → open File, click on the “test” tag in the Sidebar → (flicker and then nothing)

The one exception I’ve found is Preview.


JJW

@DrJJWMac, Try the Default Folder X app. It adds lots of stuff to Open/Save dialogs, among them tags!

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Default Folder X allows you to see and apply tags, but you can’t use tags as search criteria.

So, it doesn’t solve the OP’s problem.

I am seeing the same behavior in TextEdit. When I select a tag to display in the open/save dialog box — and not just when that tag is in the sidebar — the tagged folder does not appear. However, the same action in Preview shows the tagged folder.

Apple’s Mac help is sorta weird about tags. It says that tagging files and folders is possible, but all of the examples and descriptions are for files, not folders. It seems like tagged folders are second-class citizens.

I rarely tag folders, so I haven’t noticed this behavior before. It seems like a bug.

I wonder how Path Finder handles this?

Howard Oakley discussed some of this, a while ago:

Katie

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Yeah, another half-assed implementation by Apple.

Step 1. Hey, here’s a cool thing we’re introducing a basic version of.
Step 2. There is no step 2.

Finder tags, the Touch Bar, probably other things I can’t think of right now.

It’s even worse than the Touch Bar: tags are second-class citizens at the desktop level, while they are first-class citizens at the filesystem level.

Apple either decided not to expose much tags related stuff because they thought most people would get confused, or perhaps there are technical reasons (like, say, searches over a filesystem with a million tags would be too slow to be practical). But anyway this is a half assed implementation.

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