I have nearly 1,500 tags. Somehow, they are all marked to appear in the sidebar. My MacBook Pro is 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB of memory, but it still takes 7 seconds for Finder to remove just one of them via Finder Preferences. Is there anyway to remove all of the tags from the sidebar using Terminal or by some other means? I do not want to delete them, just remove them from the sidebar. Thanks!
How to remove all the tags at once from the Finder sidebar
finderfinder-tagsidebar
Related Solutions
On Lion, items that cannot be removed from the sidebar are usually listed under "Devices" or "Shared" (there are Snow Leopard counterparts to these as well). If you'd rather not see these items in the sidebar, you can remove them by following these steps.
With Finder focused, visit Finder->Preferences or ⌘, and select the Sidebar tab.
Uncheck items that you don't want shown in the sidebar
You might accidentally be pressing the shortcut commandT which means “Add to Sidebar” in the Finder but is used for many different things in many other applications. So if you think another application is frontmost where actually the Finder is you'd accidentally add the currently selected file to the sidebar. Happened to me a few times.
Best Answer
To remove all Tags at once, from the Sidebar in Finder, uncheck Recent Tags under Tags in the Sidebar preferences in Finder:
Finder > Preferences... > Sidebar > Tags > uncheck Recent Tags
This stops Tags from appearing in the Sidebar in Finder without deleting the Tags that have been set.