Finding unused tags

[N.A. 21]

Hi,

I've seen that to find untagged notes, one can search using criteria: -tag:*

Does anyone know if theres a similar way to find tags not assigned to any notes?

Of course it is possible to navigate to tags and observe number of notes indicated behind the tag name, however I am asking about search criteria.

Please share your ideas.

Cheers.

Naz.

[CalS 5,284]

No search criteria of which I am aware to do what you want to do.

[gazumped 11,713]

Nope - visually,  as you say, from the tags page but no way via search.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

On iOS (as least) you can sort your tag list  by "Name"... or by "Count". Those tags at the bottom of the list sorted by Count will be unused, if there are any. As I tap on each of those at the bottom of my list, it shows that there are no associated  notes. It says, "No notes found". You can hit the "Edit" button top right in your tag list and delete those tags one by one. Just be sure you're not deleting tags that are "placeholder" parent tags in your desktop/ Android tag hierarchy. 

Also, when sorted by "Count", interestingly they are also sorted alphanumerically. So a strategy for demarcating all unused tags on iOS would be to create a tag without any associated notes that you know will absolutely sort first - maybe "!1A"... and you know that all of the tags below that have zero notes assigned (while sorting by Count!).

[Bettnet 1]

This also works in the Mac version (as of April 2017). Click on tags, then click on Note Count to sort by count. Scroll all the way to the right to find your unused tags. Right-click/control-click to select Delete Tag. Beware that if the tag is from a Shared notebook it will give you an error message and warn that you can either remove the tag from notes or cancel. When I did this for a couple of tags, after the second tag, Evernote crashed. This was in Version 6.11 (454874 Direct).