In this guide, we will look at what tags are and how you can use tags to help you organise your notes in Obsidian.
What is an Obsidian tag?
An Obsidian tag allows you to group related notes together in one collection. A single note can be a member of multiple tag collections.
The tags in Obsidian should make it easier to mix ideas and knowledge together, allowing the generation of new ideas from your notes in Obsidian.
Ideally, you want to maintain your notes with a manageable amount of structure as notes can have relevance to notes in other areas, and modern note-taking or knowledge management frameworks such as PARA and Zettelkasten embrace this.
But you must have some structure to your notes and tags to allow quick retrieval of other related notes; backlinks and collections can be used to provide such connections.
Tags allow you to group related notes on a subject together. For example, I have just written a note on consciousness and realise that I have written several other notes on that subject, so I create a collection on consciousness. The note also has some relevance to Artificial Intelligence, so I added it to that collection as well.
I can then access that note quickly by opening that collection and looking through all notes relating to that subject. It allows one note to cover multiple areas of your interests.
How to add tags to an Obsidian note
In this section, you will learn the steps you need to take to add tags to a note in Obsidian.
In your note, type hash ‘#’ followed by the tag. It must be a word name. I use camel case (link to the relevant web page) to create a multiple-word tag. All existing tags will be listed once you have typed in the # symbol.
How to remove a tag from an Obsidian note
In this section, I will take you through the process of removing a tag from an Obsidian note.
To remove a tag from a note, delete the tag, including the hash. If you delete the only reference to the tag, it is removed from Obsidian.
How to find a note via its tag
In this section, I will show you how to search for related notes by its tags.
If you are in the note with the tag, just click it, and it will open the search tool on the left pane of the Obsidian. Listing all notes with that tag.
Alternatively, you can enter the Obsidian search tag and select the tag you want to search from the list.
Conclusion
In this guide, you have learned the basics of using tags in Obsidian.
You can also find all our Obsidian content listed in our Obsidian section.