Like many users, when I first started using Obsidian, I didn’t have a solid organizational structure in mind. I threw together some folders and only haphazardly tagged notes. After all, I was learning the ins and outs of the program; I didn’t realize how crucial tagging was to keeping track of things.
Once my vault grew to hundreds of different notes, it was too late to fix the damage. There were notes that just existed outside of folders with no rhyme or reason, and notes scattered throughout the vault with zero tags at all. Sure, I could have gone through and individually added tags, but that would have taken hours that could have been better spent elsewhere. That’s when I discove…
Like many users, when I first started using Obsidian, I didn’t have a solid organizational structure in mind. I threw together some folders and only haphazardly tagged notes. After all, I was learning the ins and outs of the program; I didn’t realize how crucial tagging was to keeping track of things.
Once my vault grew to hundreds of different notes, it was too late to fix the damage. There were notes that just existed outside of folders with no rhyme or reason, and notes scattered throughout the vault with zero tags at all. Sure, I could have gone through and individually added tags, but that would have taken hours that could have been better spent elsewhere. That’s when I discovered a plugin that’s one of the most boring ones on the marketplace, and yet one of my favorites: TagMany.
TagMany has saved me hours of work
You get a tag, you get a tag, everyone gets a tag
TagMany allows me to select an entire folder and add tags to every note inside it (including those within subfolders). With the addition of Obsidian Bases, I’ve sought to better organize all of my notes. I use Obsidian as, among other things, a way to track the media I consume — books, anime, games, etc. But here’s the kicker: I added most of those entries through Goodreads or MediaDB, and I didn’t have the plugins properly set up to add tags.
As a result, the Base is a huge collection of different genres. But TagMany lets me quickly select dozens of different notes and add specific tags like fantasy, sci-fi, action, etc. In just a few clicks, I tagged every single entry with “anime,” and then subdivided the main folder into smaller collections that I then tagged by genre.
There’s little tedium involved
My initial use case for TagMany involved adding genre-specific tags to content, so I only needed to add one tag per group of notes at a time. However, the plugin allows users to add multiple tags at once. All you have to do is ensure they’re separated by commas. And the best part? TagMany won’t duplicate tags, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally re-adding the same tag when you’re working with large numbers of notes. Trust me, it happens.
The plugin works exactly where I want it — in the file explorer
It feels native to Obsidian
Obsidian has more plugins than I can shake a stick at — something I’ve always thought was a weird idiom — but many have complicated interfaces that require a not-insignificant amount of time to learn. TagMany is the opposite of that. It’s straightforward; all I do is right-click a folder, and I can choose to add tags to every note in that folder. Every step of the process takes place within the file explorer or the text entry screen, but that’s it. TagMany is so simplified that it doesn’t even have options within the plugin settings menu.
It fills a void in Obsidian’s native features, and in such a seamless way that it feels like it should have always been part of the application.
On the other hand, TagMany is almost too simple
It’s a one-trick pony
TagMany doesn’t have any tricks hidden up its sleeve. It adds one or more tags to every note in a folder, but that’s it. You can’t delete tags, mass re-name tags, or find any sort of tagging analytics that you might in more complicated plugins. For example, Linter and TagWrangler both have dramatically more features; if you’re looking for a Swiss Army Knife for handling tags, TagMany probably isn’t what you’re looking for. If you’re on the hunt for a comprehensive tag management system, this plugin might feel a bit too limiting.
Its simplicity is its strength
Complicated isn’t necessarily better
The simplicity is why TagMany excels at what it does. Obsidian’s plugin ecosystem is full of powerful, extremely complicated tools. Linter is among those; while it can perform a wide range of tasks, it’s easy to mess something up. In fact, Linter suggests making a backup of your vault before applying any wide-scale changes. That’s a lot of effort when I’m simply trying to sort out a rather chaotic tagging situation.
TagMany doesn’t put my vault at risk of irreversible change. If I accidentally add a tag I don’t want, I can delete it (or use another plugin to mass delete). I wouldn’t suggest using TagMany as your only tagging plugin, but it’s a useful tool for when you need to apply tags to a large number of notes at once with as little effort as possible.
TagMany is proof that boring, focused plugins are often the most indispensable
This is not a popular plugin. It has fewer than 6,000 total downloads, and its last update was two years ago. I don’t expect to see tons of new features added anytime soon, but I do appreciate that it does one job extremely well, and I plan to keep using it for as long as it works.