Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Tags.

So what are tags in Obsidian? Simply put, tags are a way to categorise your notes so you can filter and search across them easily. And the good news is that Obsidian gives you two ways to add them, and both work exactly the same under the hood.

The first way is inline tagging, meaning you drop a tag right into the body of your note. You just type a hash symbol followed by a word, like hash-project or hash-status-active. The second way is through frontmatter, which is the block of metadata at the very top of your note. There you’d write something like tags, colon, and then list your tags in square brackets separated by commas. Both approaches are indexed identically by Obsidian, so it doesn’t matter which you use from a search perspective. That said, frontmatter tags are the preferred approach for structured notes because it keeps your note body clean and uncluttered.

Now let’s talk about nested tags, which are really useful once your vault starts to grow. You create a nested tag by putting a forward slash between levels. So for example you might have a tag for area-work, another for area-personal, and then status-active and status-archived. What this does is create a hierarchy. In the Tags panel on the left sidebar, those nested tags fold neatly under their parent. And here’s the handy part when it comes to searching: if you search for area, Obsidian will match everything under that parent, so all of your area-work and area-personal notes come back in one go. You don’t have to search each sub-tag individually.

Speaking of the Tags panel, you can find it in the left sidebar by clicking the Tags icon. It gives you a full list of every tag used across your entire vault, along with a count of how many notes carry each one. Click any tag in that panel and Obsidian immediately opens a search showing all the notes that use it.

Now let’s cover searching with tags directly, because there are a few different ways to do it. If you just type a hash followed by your tag word in the search bar, you’ll get notes that contain that tag inline in the body. If you want to catch tags whether they’re in the frontmatter or inline, you prefix your query with tag-colon and then your hash and tag name. And if you want to search across an entire nested tag family, you can type tag-colon, hash, your parent tag name, and then a forward slash, and Obsidian will return every note tagged with anything under that parent.

Finally, it’s worth understanding the difference between tags and folders, because you’ll be using both in a well-organised vault. There are a few key differences to keep in mind. With folders, a note lives in exactly one place on your filesystem. With tags, a single note can carry as many tags as you like. Folders give you a hierarchical, physical organisation structure. Tags give you cross-cutting categorisation that cuts across those folder boundaries. Both are queryable through Dataview, although the syntax differs slightly: for folders you use a FROM clause pointing to the folder path, while tags just filter by tag name. The practical takeaway is to use folders as your primary organisation method and tags for attributes that span multiple folders, things like status, note type, or service codes.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.