I have various files that came from a university library database, and are tagged with the keywords from that database. Many of these are multiple-word tags, including “SOMME, First battle of the, France, 1916”. This was all very well until I wanted to tag some files only with the year “1916”. Whatever I do, DT insists on changing this to “SOMME, … etc.” This occurs even after I have tabbed out of the pane for editing tags, having entered a tag for “1916” and nothing else. When I next view the file, the tag has been changed. I even tried tagging a file that is only indexed by DT (not imported into the database) with Tagger. Outside DT, the OpenMeta tag appears as “1916”, but DT changes this to display as “SOMME, … etc.”
The first thing to check would be to select the ‘SOMME…’ tag, show the info for this tag, and make sure that an alias of ‘1916’ has not been assigned to this tag. If that’s not the case, I’ve found that I can force a tag by typing multiple spaces after the tag. So for ‘1916’, I’d type that and 2-3 spaces, the tag will be applied and DT will truncate the trailing spaces.
Many, many thanks for your advice. It was indeed a rogue alias (in fact the whole name of the tag appeared twice in the alias pane, so there must have been some sort of glitch). I also found a few others which I didn’t deliberately enter, and I’m wondering if aliases get automatically created if you merge tags, or edit names (changing case, for example). It’s something I’ll have to watch. Thanks also for the tip about the trailing spaces – I’ll try to remember it.
That’s precisely what merging tags does-it takes the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,… tags in a list of selected tags and adds them as an alias to the 1st selected tag in the list.
Note that 1st, 2nd, etc. in the selection refers to where the tags appear from top to bottom of the list. So if I have the tags ‘Alpha’ and ‘Bravo’ in an alpha-sorted list, I select ‘Bravo’ first, ‘Alpha’ second, and perform the merge, the tag ‘Alpha’ will still be the target tag and ‘Bravo’ will be added as the alias. To make ‘Bravo’ the target tag, one would first need to do something to make it appear on top in the list-either temporarily rename it or change the list sort order to unsorted and drag ‘Bravo’ to appear above ‘Alpha’.