Having great difficulty organizing items by tags

Question

I want to use tags to search for items on my Mac. I want to assign tags to documents and items I keep in iCloud, and ideally, other items in other apps, such as Notes and Photos. I've created tags on Finder and tagged a few things to test how well it works with iCloud documents. It doesn't work well. I can't search for items that have more than one tag. For example, I have tons of items pertaining to gardening--photos, documents, websites, etc. If I am searching for evergreen native trees, I want to search within "Garden" for items tagged "tree" and "evergreen" and "native." Nothing comes up even though I have many items with these tags. The best I can get are items with one additional tag.

I use tags in Evernote and Zotero in this way. There are also third party apps that try to fill the gap, such as Tagception, but I really don't want to add a new layer. Surely Apple must have a simple system to achieve the same! I've engaged in several chats with others who struggle as I do. I don't want to use complicated boolian strings, etc.

Answer 1

According to Apple support document Use tags to organise files on Mac:

You can tag files and folders to make them easier to find. Tags work with all your files and folders, whether you store them on your Mac or keep them in iCloud.

So "items" must be files or folders in order to be tagged.

Tags are not taxonomy. In order to search multiple tags one should use boolean operator AND as described in Narrow your search results on Mac.

I tested on my machine (Sonoma 14.2.1) and it works as expected: tagged some files with built-in color tags and then used Tag: Blue AND Yellow AND Purple and it displayed only files which were tagged with these three colors.