Are tags portable, and if so how?

Question

I am a relatively new Mac user, recently bought a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.1.

I see that there are tagging capabilities within the file system. I'm concerned about portability. If I get a new computer in a few years, how would I transfer my tags to the new system? What if I want to move my files to a Windows or Linux machine? Can I see the tags on these operating systems?

I just don't want to put some effort into the built-in tagging system only to have my tags useless at some point down the road.

Answer 1

Tags are not 100% portable in that they don't always survive mailing or copying to other computers such as Linux or Windows. On that respect, it's more about those OS supporting the Apple filesystem. I am impressed that even copying tagged files to a SMB formatted USB drive preserves the tag metadata and most copy operations from and to another Mac via an HFS+ hard drive or share does preserve the tags well in practice. (Even copying the file to a 10.8 or older Mac didn't strip tags in my tests).

Apple's article covering tags, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5839, recommends:

If you want to include your Tags when sending files through Mail, Messages, or other apps, compress your files and folders before sending them.

Answer 2

Yes, tags are completely portable as they are saved to the file as extended attributes. Copying/moving the file keeps the tags as they are saved as com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags to the file.

Answer 3

I found an interesting article over here which goes into some detail about the portability of tags in macOS. There is some writeup but it attempts to answer the question, "Which file systems and Cloud services preserve extended attributes?".