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
    edited July 17, 2022
    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.
  • Kumabjorn
    Has that been done. I have bibliography that I need to separate into different groups based on language. Most references are to Japanese books so I figured I could do a search with NOT English; German OR French and separate out the rest. Doesn't seem to be the case so I want to add the tag 日本語 to the books that are written in Japanese.
  • Kumabjorn
    Don't worry. I found it. Multiple selection and drag it into the chosen tag in the Show All Tags in the far left down corner. You just have to remember to show them all. Nice, but perhaps somewhat unintuitive, feature. Maybe it's just me but I thought you'd be able to click the Tag icon to the right and then select a given tag.
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