Tags in Finder not working with Sequoia?

Go to System Preferences, then Spotlight, then Search Privacy. Then hit the + button and add the root of the hard drive so it will be excluded from Spotlight (see screenshot below). Wait about five minutes, then remove it from the exclusion list using the minus button.

Spotlight will then start rebuilding its index. After a while, all tagged files should reappear, and Finder search results should work properly.

I hope this helps!

FWIW I was able to fix my missing tags issue as well as the Finder search issue. I went to Spotlight preferences then Privacy and added the root of the hard drive so it would be excluded from Spotlight. I waited about five minutes then removed it from the exclusion list. Spotlight then started rebuilding its index and as of the next day, all my tagged files showed up and Finder search results were exhaustive again.

I hope this helps!

Specifically, custom tags on external drives aren't working anymore. Info shows Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the volume. The custom tags are preserved during copy operations, and show up in the tag column in Finder, but they cannot be searched, nor does typing the tag in the search field display a tag selectable item in the search dropdown (or tag: followed by the tag). Built-in tags like colors work without issue. Since I recall being able to search with tags on an external drive, I think this is a bug introduced in Sequoia.

When you hit the + button, click the folder in the center of the window and you will see a dropdown similar to the one shown below. Choose the Macintosh HD, which means Spotlight will exclude everything on the hard drive from search results.

After a few minutes, you can remove the exclusion, which will trigger Spotlight to rebuild its index.

The Finder tags survive on FAT32 and exFAT drives mounted to Sequoia v15.1. They are also retained on my Synology DiskStation NAS on a Shared drive being delivered as AFP over TCP/IP. They would not survive on a Windows NTFS drive, any Linux distro filesystem, or on a Cloud Service incompatible with Finder since tags are Finder extended attributes.

Now, it started working properly. The spotlight privacy fix only helped for both issues. Thanks to community

All of my Finder-tagged files have not changed since the installation of Sequoia v15.1, or fail to be found using Spotlight using the tag or kMDItemUserTags reserved keywords.

Can you expand further on what you mean by "they are not working anymore" and the circumstances when they do not work?

RichcraftStudios wrote:

Also, when I've tried uploading files via a web browser or to a chat, the colored tags don't show in the upload window.

I have not paid attention to Finder tags/labels when uploading or when using in foreign filesystems but it seems to work in Safari when inserting images to this forum post.

I'm experiencing the same problem, and it's quite frustrating. For those wondering, here is a screenshot of what searching for the tags in Finder results in—nothing. It does not work when using the magnifying glass search and specifying tag:proposal, either.