XYplorer Beta Club

If you go into the properties of a file in Windows Explorer, you can add tags to it.
XYplorer can also show and work with tags. At first I thought these two were the same tags and was puzzled when files I had tagged using Explorer were not showing up in XYplorer, but it looks like these are two separate systems. So my question is, can XYplorer work with the Windows Explorer tags, or do you have to choose between them as your tagging system? Using default Windows Explorer tag's is advantageous because tools like Everything can search those as well.

I did a search but got lots of hits on just making XYplorer's own tags working.

About which file type extensions are we talking?

I want to use it with documents (pdf, md, docx etc) but really for any extension. I can add tags in Explorer to any file and then use either Windows search or preferably something like Everything to find them easily. But I cannot tell if XYplorer can access and modify Window's own tags, or it XYplorer strictly is limited to its own tagging/labeling system.

Update: It looks like Windows itself is really limited in the use of tags for a bunch of filetypes, so this method is probably best not pursued. I will look into XYplorer's implementation and others. I was really hoping I could do a fast global search using Everything to find tagged items.

highend wrote: ↑26 Sep 2025 16:45 About which file type extensions are we talking?

Some of these (e.g. doc, docx, xls, xlsx) have their own way to store tags while others use ADS (alternate data streams) for this (e.g. .md).

Scripting (including .vbs with COM automation for Office file items) could show / write most of these tags, but this isn't done natively via XY.