How To: Rename a Tag in Google Reader
HowTo, Reader April 15th, 2007 - By HaochiMany people complained about the lack of tag* renaming feature in Google Reader. Sure, there is no direct way, but a simple get around would do the trick, and this is how you do it:
- Go to the Settings page of Google Reader
- Enter the tag name you want to change in the input field that labeled “Filter by name, tag, or URL” (right side of the page)
- Click “Select: All {number} subscriptions” (left side of the page, right under the “Subscription” tab)
- Create a new tag under one of the feeds in “Change folders” (find “New folder…”)
- Go to “More actions…” and choose the tag you just created under “Add tag…”
- Go to “More actions…” again and click the old tag that you don’t want, under “Remove tag…” to remove the tag
- See it in action if you don’t get it (video)
That’s it, six steps aren’t much, you can do it under a minute. If you know a better way to rename the tags in Google Reader, let us know.
*Google has different names for the tagging feature: tags, labels, and folders, probably more



May 13th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Brilliant I was looking for a way to do this. Can’t believe they didn’t add a rename feature like they did in gmail.
July 1st, 2007 at 1:39 pm
What if you want to delete the tag altogether? So, in my case, I have a tag that I made by mistake, so I renamed it, but the tag still exists in my feeder with nothing in it. How do I get rid of that?
July 1st, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Settings -> Tags, click the trash can icon next to the tag(s) you want to delete.
July 1st, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Wow that seems so obvious now… I don’t know why I couldn’t find it before…
July 1st, 2007 at 10:29 pm
LOL! :)
July 24th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Does anyone know the email of the engineer responsible for this? Let’s send this instructions to him. Maybe then he could figure out how to fix the application.
September 24th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Exactly what I needed, thanks.
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:20 am
that doesn’t completely work since you can also add labels to individual entries, not just subscriptions. there doesn’t appear to be a way to rename the labels for entries.
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:50 pm
UX issue! Google changed the name of what we’re looking for from ‘folder’ to ‘tag’ (both semantically confusing) and this is enough to trip the majority of us up…I searched for ages to find the answer posted in this blog too…
October 25th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
This is an OK workaround, but you lose any settings you might have applied to the feed (browse by …)
October 30th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Hi, I was browsing Google looking for an answer to this and ended up here. This cleared a lot up so cheers!
I agree with the semantic comments about folders and tags though - hopefully they will get that sorted. An explorer style folder/feed management tool would be cool to make it easy to put folders in to other folders and stuff…
Cheers again.
November 12th, 2007 at 4:25 am
I found no tages under the “Remove Tags”. They are all under the add tags only, and remove tags function is the last in the menu! So I tried your other option - trash the unwanted tag from the tag settings page… Done! and Thanks!
November 29th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Guys, just export your subscriptions in XML, modify the XML, delete all the subscriptions online and reimport again.. way easier and fast
December 23rd, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Marvellous. Like all truly great work - obvious, but only in retrospect. Thank you!
January 17th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Hey Now Chen,
Nice post very useful. I didn’t know how to do this until I read it & I just renamed & organized my feeds better. Thank you very much.
Catto
February 5th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Thanks for this information. I looked for quite a while on how to do this. I agree with the others that it was a fairly silly move to rename what everyone generally thinks of as “folders” to the far more ambiguous “tags.” My guess is they want to be seen as having folder-less interfaces. Just as Gmail has no folders, neither shall Google Reader. Only problem is, we could really use the organizational help folders provide in a feed reading-setting.