Feature Request: Faceted Tag Navigation with AND Filtering

[tk_nb]

Feature Request: Faceted Tag Navigation and AND Filtering for Tags

First of all, thank you for Paperpile — it’s an excellent tool, especially with its cloud-based design and Google Drive integration. I use it daily and it suits almost all my needs.

That said, there’s one feature I truly miss from a classic Mac app called “Yep!” (developed by Ironic Software, around 2005–2015). It had a remarkably intuitive and efficient faceted tag navigation system.

Specifically, I’d love to see the following features in Paperpile:

1. AND filtering of tags: Selecting multiple tags should narrow down the search (rather than expanding it).
2. Dynamic tag sidebar: When a tag is selected, the sidebar should only show tags that exist among the currently displayed documents — just like Yep! used to do.
3. Incremental filtering: Adding more tags progressively narrows the result, making it easier to pinpoint documents.

Yep! made it incredibly smooth to drill down through a large PDF library using tags — starting broad (e.g., “2020”) and narrowing step by step (e.g., “May”, then “Conference”).

Would it be possible to offer a “Faceted Mode” toggle in Paperpile to enable this kind of navigation?

I truly believe this would elevate Paperpile to a whole new level for power users and academic researchers.

Thanks again!

[suzanne]

Welcome to our forum, @tk_nb, and thank you for your kind words!

I’m happy to say we already support AND filtering of labels. To narrow down your search using multiple labels as criteria, just hold down the Shift key when clicking on labels in the sidebar. This applies all selected labels as criteria, so you’ll only see references that match all of them.

AND filtering also applies when selecting folders and/or filters, for example, “Has PDF”.

However, we don’t yet support dynamic filtering of the label list itself — where only labels relevant to the current filtered results remain visible in the sidebar (like the behavior you described in “Yep!”). That idea has been suggested by other users, so I’ve added your +1 to our internal feature tracker.

[tk_nb]

Thank you so much, Suzanne!

Great to know that AND filtering is already there — I missed the Shift-click feature!

And I really appreciate you adding my +1 for dynamic label filtering. It may seem small, but it would be a big help for navigating large libraries.

Thanks again, and I’ll be hoping to see it someday — and thanks to the whole Paperpile team as well!