Is there a way to combine two tags?

I realize I have two redundant tags. “Blackface” and “Minstrelsy”. I want to combine them so they become one tag, “blackface minstrelsy.”

What’s the easiest way to replace the two tags, across multiple items, with one?

Thanks much for helpful ideas.

There are probably many ways to do this simply. The first thing that comes to mind is to:

  1. Rename the ‘Blackface’ tag to ‘blackface minstrelsy’,
  2. search for the documents tagged ‘Minstrelsy’ and apply the tag ‘blackface minstrelsy’, and
  3. delete the tag ‘Minstrelsy’.

You could also

  1. Command-click on the ‘Blackface’ and the ‘Minstrelsy’ tags in the Three pane view
  2. select all those documents,
  3. use the script menu command Tags>Add tags to selection,
  4. apply the new ‘blackface minstrelsy’ tag, and
  5. delete the Blackface and Minstrelsy tags.

You can also select two or more tags in the Tags group, control click the selection, and choose “merge”. The tags will be combined into a single tag with the name of the first tag, alphabetically. Then, merely rename that tag.

For example, if I have a tag “bling”, and a tag “blung” and I select them both, control-click, and choose merge, then I’ll have one tag named “bling” that contains all the documents from the two, combined.

Does control-clicking on two tags bring up “merge” only on PC? On OS 10.9.5 I only get a popup window with cut, copy, paste, and then the list of things like font, speech, etc when I do that. This happens in the window and the bottom tag row both.

I want to rename some of my tags with shorter names since I have so many of them stacking up in the same line. I think I could do this if I could merge the shorter name tag with the longer name tag. It sounds like I would have to make the shorter name tag come before the longer one in the alphabet in order for it to save as this shorter tag, correct? Is there any place where there is just an editable list of all tags used in the database?

:question: :question:

You’re not control-clicking the Tags in the Tags bar. Look at the Tags group in the directory (middle) pane.