odd tag behavior?

I made a new tag for an item. It appeared in the TAGS folder, in the Groups & Tags pane. I tried applying the tag to another item, by dragging the tag from the G&T pane to the item. Instead of being added to the item, the tag vanished (like dragging something out of the sidebar of the Finder.) I found that it had left the G&T pane but turned into a folder in the Inbox (the area to which I must have dragged it). If a tag is both a “tag” and a “folder” , or is a “folder” that is also known and used as a “tag”, why can’t it be in both places at once?

Although it does not appear any more in the TAGS folder in G&T, the tag does still exist and if I select an item, Show Info, and begin typing the initial letters of it in the TAG box it will appear as one of the choices.

Something about this double-identity of tags and folders just doesn’t seem right to me.

One of the effects that I think is objectively counter-productive is that it means the list for auto-fill or choice, when applying a tag, may be very very long because it includes all the folders as well as the tags. If I have 1 tag that begins with pre-, and 20 folders that begin with those letters, I see 21 choices and have to type farther to activate autofill. Can’t I just see the tags? If I wanted it in a folder, I’d do that differently rather than using the TAGS pane.

I guess it is too late to even propose that DTPro change this double-identity, even if every user agreed with me which I am sure is not the case. But I post this to see if others may find some aspects of the tag/folder arrangement less than ideal, and then in future development perhaps those aspects could be altered a bit.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Tag moved when you dragged it out of the G&T pane. Had you dragged the document to the Tag, then you would have seen the expected result.

There is some difference between groups and tags, where tags are attached to documents while groups contain the documents.

You can change the double identity now. Go to ‘File>Database Properties…>yourdatabase’ and check ‘Exclude Groups from Tagging’. I did this long ago as I work much better with the concept that Groups are the locations where documents are contained and Tags are the metadata labels attached to documents.