Emojis are often used to convey emotions, thoughts, or actions. They are also sometimes used as visual indicators to provide more context to documents. But should you use them in DEVONthink 🧐? (more)

Sometimes we use several names for the same thing, like nicknames, acronyms and so on. In DEVONthink you can use such aliases for documents and other objects, for example tags. Here we show you how that works and what you can do with them. (more)

Many people use tags as a way to add some context to their documents. We have blogged on the subject more than once, but one option some people may not be aware of is nested (or hierarchical) tags. These are tags with child tags, or related tags within tags. Here’s how you can make and use them in DEVONthink. (more)

With the mass of information often found in a DEVONthink database, color can be a helpful visual indicator when browsing your documents. Many people know you can apply color labels on your documents, similar to the Finder, but here’s how to also color your tags in DEVONthink. (more)

The Database Properties popover in DEVONthink has, among many other things, controls for per-database tagging behavior. Here’s what those options do. (more)

One of the methods of organizing data is tagging. Supported by DEVONthink as well as in some other applications, including the Finder, tags can provide contextual relationships between items, either broadly or narrowly defined. Here is a simple way to think about tags. (more)

For many people, tags are a useful way of segregating or creating contextual relationships between items. Some prefer a small set of broad tags, while others create deep, specific tag lists. But sometimes tags can seem to appear out of nowhere. These could come in, e.g., from the outside world through Finder tags. Here’s how to avoid “unexpected tagging” in DEVONthink. (more)

In episode 128 of Brett Terpstra’s podcast Systematic, Joel Anderson, research lecturer in Philosophy at Utrecht in the Netherlands, joins Brett to talk about tagging:

It’s a nerdy subject that a lot of non-nerds are asking about these days, and one that I personally find fascinating. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing two people who’ve dedicated time and research to the topic debate the major benefits and pitfalls of tag-based systems!” … (more)

DEVONthink and DEVONnote treat groups and tags, basically, the same but display them different. That means that if Exclude Groups from Tagging is unchecked in a database’s properties, the group(s) in which an item is filed also appear as tag(s) attached to it. When assigning tags to an item other groups are proposed as tags while you’re typing. If you like this behavior you can quickly file a document in multiple groups and later find them either by their tags or in the respective groups representing the tags. (more)

While tags and groups are technically the same, their different way of presentation can be more flexible, especially in large DEVONthink knowledge collection spreading out in many directions. Using the tags bar (which you show and hide with View > Show/Hide Tags) you quickly add single tags to documents or remove them. Automatic completion makes adding already known tags easy. (more)