How can I bulk add a tag to many files?

learningme

I've created a red tag for unread files and a green for read files, but I don't know how to mark all as unread. I'm sure it's simple and I've googled and experimented. Any tips much appreciated.

dstillman

You can select the items and press the number key on the keyboard associated with the colored tag.

https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#colored_tags

You can also drag multiple items to tags to assign them, whether or not the tags have colors assigned.

learningme

Excellent. I had no idea you could drag items onto tags. Thank you so much.

fulaoshi

The one problem I have is that you can't drag an item on to a tag that isn't there, so what you have to do is first de-select everything you had selected, add the tag to one of the items, then re-select all the items you had selected earlier - and then drag the items over. It seems to me that this workflow could be improved somewhat... Or maybe there is another way that I'm missing?

bwiernik

A keyboard shortcut to pop up a textbox to enter a tag to apply to selected items would be doable. You might request this on the Zutilo GitHub page—the developer might be willing to implement it.

hsiangyu_wong

@bwiernik
Zotero Tag addon also provides this kind of popup and allows users to add/remove multiple tags to multiple items.

See https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-tag

bwiernik

Awesome! Didn’t know about that one

qqbb

I haven't tested the Zotero Tag add-on, but I think it would be nice if Zotero could add an improved version of such a popup natively. The option could follow the behavior of the Labels button for selected messages in Gmail. You'd be able to add or remove tags for the selected items, including tag auto-completion as in the Tags tab. Zotero now has an "Add to Collection" option in the context menu, so a native "Add Tags" option next to it would be nice. A tag manager is planned, but I'm not sure if it's supposed to manage tags of the selected items.

BTW, with the Zutilo add-on, a list of tags (separated by line breaks) can be pasted to the selected Zotero items. You can use Zutilo's "Copy tags" function to copy the tags of selected Zotero items to the clipboard. Paste that to a text editor to modify the list if necessary.

dstillman

Yes, we're planning to add a way to add new tags to multiple items.

cream_dream

Dstillman, I'm delighted to hear that you're working on that -- such a function would be extremely convenient.