# Feature request: option to exclude a tag from «Assign Existing Tags»
**URL:** https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/feature-request-option-to-exclude-a-tag-from-assign-existing-tags/83196
**Category:** DEVONthink
**Tags:** dt4, feature-request
**Created:** [April 23, 2025, 6:23am UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/feature-request-option-to-exclude-a-tag-from-assign-existing-tags/83196 "2025-04-23T06:23:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@meowky](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/u/meowky)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2025, 6:23am UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/feature-request-option-to-exclude-a-tag-from-assign-existing-tags/83196/1 "2025-04-23T06:23:25Z")
**Use case:** I don’t want some tags to be automatically assigned. For instance, I have a `#free` tag which is a child of an `#app` tag. It’s frequently given to philosophical essays about the free will. That’s not desirable.
Having an `Exclude from Assign Existing Tags` toggle available for each individual tag seems like a simple way to solve the problem.
Thanks in advance for consideration.
---
### Author:  [@cgrunenberg](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/u/cgrunenberg)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2025, 6:55am UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/feature-request-option-to-exclude-a-tag-from-assign-existing-tags/83196/2 "2025-04-23T06:55:06Z")
> [@meowky](#):
>
> Having an `Exclude from Assign Existing Tags` toggle available for each individual tag seems like a simple way to solve the problem.
Thanks for the suggestion! This would indeed be an easy way but of course we can’t add exclusion flags for every feature. Therefore let’s wait and see how common the need for such an option is.
---
### Author:  [@lerone](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/u/lerone)
#### Post date: [December 21, 2025, 6:59pm UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/feature-request-option-to-exclude-a-tag-from-assign-existing-tags/83196/3 "2025-12-21T18:59:30Z")
Similar need/want here: I would like to have a negative list/exclusion for tags that should not be automatically assigned by extraction from indexed markdown documents (– given the automatic “Hashtags to Tags” is activated in presets)
Rationale: documents living in different apps will regularly follow different tagging patterns. It is great to have these transported over into ones DT-system, in principal. But systematic use will – given different taggings systems – regularly clog/”infect” ones DT-system where those vocabularies will differ (e.g. as neccessitated by different naming conventions/synataxes); …which is especially unwanted in cases where these tag-sets for the DT-database are cultivated (controlled vocabulary).
TIA for considering, also in terms of these slightly differentiated but nevertheless related use-cases/scenarios.
PS: even more luxury/adaptability would be a way to automate the transformation of existing hashtags into DT tags acc to certain transformation lists/custom ”thesauri”.
[edit - solved, kind of…] – Leave this here for people w/ same requirement, as (kind of) solution: Actually, I just found that setting the (converted) tag in the native DT tag folder to “exclude from tagging” also retroactively deletes tags w/ this name from newly parsed markdown files. (Strange idiosyncracy: after the markdown document is rid of that hashtag-turned-tag there still remains an empty tag of same name in the tag folder (– alongside the first disabled tag, that is the tag that was set on “exclude from tagging, and ended up as “group” within the tag folder 🤷)
---
### Author:  [@mlw](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/u/mlw)
#### Post date: [August 9, 2026, 11:40pm UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/feature-request-option-to-exclude-a-tag-from-assign-existing-tags/83196/4 "2026-08-09T23:40:50Z")
I’d love this too. Just posted this before finding this topic
> [@Exclude tag from tag suggestions](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/exclude-tag-from-tag-suggestions/87431):
>
> I’d like to be able to exclude tags from the tags suggestion, similar to how I can exclude groups from classification. Ideally this should exclude the tag from the suggested tags pane and automations (assign existing tags the various scripts, etc and everywhere tags are auto suggested). I use tags for various purposes. To assign types to records (for references I might tag an item as a precedent, an article, a book chapter), to control whether a record has been processed by a smart rule so that…