Common tags not displayed when multiple items selected

On p. 15 of the latest manual (DT 3.0.1) it states (emphasis added):
“In the case of multiple selected items, any tags common to all the items will be shown in the Info inspector and Info popup. Tags unique to specific files aren’t displayed.”

This does not match the behavior I am seeing. In the screenshot below, the four selected files all have the tag “NERGC”, which does not appear in the Inspector or the tag bar (or in the info popover, not displayed here). This is apparently because they also have date (year) tags that are different; the first two are tagged “2015”, the third “2017”, and the fourth “2019”.

If I select only the first two, which have both “NERGC” and “2015” tags in common, then both tags are displayed in both the Inspector and the tag bar (next screenshot).

I should note that on p. 32 it states (emphasis added):
“The tag bar is also visible for multiple selected documents when all the documents have the same tags attached. Use it to change the tags on multiple documents.”

Apparently this is the expected behavior for the tag bar – that all of the tags must be the same for all the documents for them to appear in the tag bar – and the Inspector and info popover are behaving the same way, despite the statement on p. 15.

I believe you should be able to select multiple files and be able to see what tags they have in common, regardless of what other tags they may have. This would allow you to remove a tag from all the items (by simply selecting and deleting it in the tag bar) or quickly check whether a group of files is already tagged uniformly with a particular tag.

I hope you will fix this so that the tags in the Inspector and Info popover work as stated on p. 15, and make the tag bar behavior consistent with the other features.

This is an issue of the documentation, the common tags are currently only displayed if all items have the same tags.

Are there any plans to change this? I think it would be a lot more useful if it wasn’t required for all the same tags to be present on all selected files.

So you would prefer that it show the common tags and ignore the other tags? I expect that could be quite confusing.

Not at all. This is the way Evernote handles the tag display for multiple selected items, and I find it quite useful.

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I would request the feature to display the common tag.

In my use case, I will have several documents for which I will want to remove the common tag (the only common tag between them) from all the documents at the same time.

Adobe Lightroom does a hybrid approach. When multiple photos are selected, the Keyword pane shows all keywords used by all photos. Any keywords shared by all selected photos are listed normally, while any keywords only assigned to a subset of the selected photos are shown with an asterix.

This lets you select a bunch of photos that you feel should have the same tag, see if they do, and if they don’t easily fix it (remove the asterix, and the keyword gets applied to all.

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That sounds ideal. It covers everything you might want to do, I think.