I want to find any items that have two certain tags. If I select one tag and then hold down control t select the second tag, I get items that have either or both the tags.
I want only those items that have both tags. How do I do this?
Switch to the Tags view. The other views give you the union of the tags (tagA and/or tagB and/or tagC…) while multiple selections in the Tags view will give you the intersect of the tags (tagA and tagB and tagC…).
The Advanced button in the full Search window (Tools > Search) adds the ability to search for tags (including items that have only specified tags, but not another named tag), date ranges, etc.
The Advanced button is similar to the smart group editor. Tip: to add multiple predicates, such as Tag, hold down the Option key when clicking on the “+” button to add another instance of the predicate.
Another neat feature of the full Search window is that one can turn a search query that might be repeated in the future into a smart group. Just click on the “+” button to the right of the query field, Name and Save the new smart group.
Thanks Greg - Tags View has just changed my life.
Thanks for these very useful tips.
Greg, when multiple tags are selected in tags view, is there any way to tell how many items are in the ‘combined’ list? If, for example, I have one tag with 144 items and another tag with 206 items and then select both, I can’t seem to tell at a glance how many items share both tags.
Yes, click in the list of documents in the top of the pane and select all of them with (command-a) or Menu>Edit>Select All (your selection of tags on the right side of the window will not be lost). The total number of documents selected will appear in the preview pane.
Glad to help. The Tags view is serviceable, but I do hope that in a future version of DEVONthink that this view is improved, or replaced entirely with a tag cloud that allows the user to narrow the list of available tags based on the selection, even exclude tags from the list by right-clicking on them.
Bill’s suggestion works functionally, but in practice it is just not practical when I want to quickly filter documents by tags. Building compound predicates in a search/smart group is just painful-I feel like I am programming code rather than just trying to find some documents.
A tag cloud addresses both of the challenges listed above. Ammonite does all this pretty well working with DEVONthink databases, but this functionality really needs to be built into DEVONthink.
Thanks Greg. I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Still, I was hoping that this could be done in the navigation bar, which will tell me that I have x tags selected from x total.
I mentioned use of the Advanced button because quite often, a “tag cloud” alone wouldn’t be sufficient, as I need to filter by other criteria than tags, as well.