How to Finally Organize Your Random Notes on IPhone
Annotation is a feature that can separate a simple note-taking app from a powerful one. And when it comes to note-taking apps, you had to choose a third-party option (often the one that costs money) to take advantage of this useful feature, but nothing more.
In iOS 15 , iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey, Apple added the tagging feature to Apple Notes (by the way, this is already our recommendation for the best note-taking app on iPhone ). Now, finally, you can tag any note with a simple hashtag and find all the notes that match the hashtag with one touch.
As someone who uses Apple Notes for all of their notes, this change is more than welcome. Adding tags can help you organize your notes in a way that a traditional folder system cannot – although speaking of them, the Notes app also lets you create smart folders that can display notes from multiple tags. Here’s how to get started.
How to tag notes in Apple Notes
All you need to tag a note is to add one word (you cannot use a phrase, or at least not remove spaces), preceded by a hashtag (#). And you can do it anywhere: in the headline or in the text.
Let’s say you want to mark your todo list as #todo. Enter “#todo” anywhere in the note. You have just created a new hashtag. You can repeat this for all important notes. The active hashtag will be displayed in yellow.
How to Find Tagged Notes in Apple Notes
The Marked Notes section is strangely hidden. After opening the Notes application, click the Folders button in the upper left corner of the screen to go to the Folders screen. Here, scroll down the page and find the “Tags” section.
You can select the All Tags option to see all tagged notes. Select a specific tag to see all the notes associated with it. After selecting a tag at the top, you will see a carousel with all your tags. You can select multiple tags here.
You can also search for any tagged notes using the hashtag in your search (this is a much faster way to find the notes you want).
How to organize tagged notes in smart folder in Apple Notes
Let’s say you want an easy way to access all of your work-related notes. Try to group them into a smart folder based on a tagging system.
The beauty of the smart folder is that it updates automatically. Once you determine that a folder should contain notes from certain tags (you can choose as many as you like), it will continually update the folder with new tagged notes.
To get started, open the Notes app on your iPhone or iPad and click the Folders button in the upper left corner. Click the New Folder button in the lower left corner and select New Smart Folder .
Give the folder a name, select the tags you want to add, and click Finish .
Now you will see all related notes in one window. If you later want to change the tags for your Smart Folder, click the three-dot menu button at the top and select the Edit Smart Folder option.
How to Delete Tags and Smart Folders in Apple Notes
Apple Notes does not provide a clear way to remove tags as they are automatically filled in. If you no longer want to see the tag, you need to delete all notes associated with it, or manually remove the tag from all notes.
Deleting a smart folder is much easier: find a smart folder in the Folders window, swipe left on it, tap the Delete icon , and then select the Delete Smart Folder option to confirm. Notes inside it will not be deleted; just the folder in which they are grouped.