hi there.
i’ve got a problem with the smartgroup „tags“ in some of my databases. for eyample: there are two similar databases (quantity, structure, age etc.) – one db has a working „tags“ group, one db has an empty tags-group instead? but tags-view (cmd-6) shows me a bunch of tags in both?
i’ve tried nearly everything like rebuild, copy, manual tagging and so one, but the tags-smartgroups remains empty? there are 11 db’s and 6 with this problem. can you help me? what’s going wrong?
thank you and regards,
jan
The Tags View (Cmd-6) displays both the tags assigned in the Tags Group (displayed with a blue tag) as well as the tags inherited from the groups that contain the documents (currently displayed with a gray tag). It sounds like you have not assigned tags (blue tags) in some of your databases, so the Tags Group is still empty, yet the Tags View (Cmd-6) will display the tags (gray) assigned by the containing groups.
hi greg!
but how to assign the tags in a correct way for the database? i’m wondering why the behaviour is so different, although the db’s were edited the same way?
i can follow now the blue and the grey tags – you’re right 
but i’m wondering the blue tags coming from? i don’t edited them manually …
best regards,
jan
A ‘correct’ way to assign tags to documents in the database is rather subjective, so there is no right or wrong answer. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll share my strategy using the colors that (currently) differentiate the two types of tags. If, as a hypothetical example, I have research documents on knowledge management in the manufacturing industry, I’ll have a group or sub-group named KM Research. I’ll let these documents inherit the gray ‘KM Research’ tag. I might further tag these documents with blue tags for ‘author’s name’, ‘Manufacturing’, etc. My primary means of creating/assigning/removing blue tags is through the tag bar below the navigation pane. The tag bar is turned on/off by toggling the far right icon in the picture below. There are multiple other ways to work with blue tags, but this method is the most expedient for me.
I could also accomplish the same results by creating sub-groups in the database for ‘Authors’ and ‘Manufacturing’ and replicate the document from ‘KM Research’ to both sub-groups. If I have a large group of authors, the best approach for me might be to blend the two. I would create a sub-group (gray tag) for ‘Authors’ and a blue tag for ‘Manufacturing’ to keep the number of blue tags manageable and meaningful.
As to the question why you are seeing a different behavior in your databases-I don’t know. It could be that the blue tags came from RSS feeds that had categories converted to tags and/or some of the documents already had Open Meta tags assigned to them by another application (MailTags, Fresh, Default Folder, etc.). If the blue tags are not meaningful to you, go ahead and delete them from the Tags Group. Your documents will remain in the database, but the tag(s) will not.