Suspending cards - what happens to the associated tags in Browse?

Anki Help
1

I no longer need a deck I have created, but I would like to keep it accessible in order to share it with other students who are studying for the same exam in the future. However, my tagging system wasn’t great (I used way too many tags that were too small in scope) and I’d like to redo my tags going forward for the next exam. I will likely reuse some of the previous tags in the new deck but definitely not all of them.

My concern is this: If I suspend all of the cards in the deck, do the tags stay in the sidebar of the browse window? If that’s the default, is there a way to avoid this? Or should I just export the old deck, save the file somewhere, and then delete them from my account - as I assume this would get rid of the tags in the sidebar?

2

Yes. Suspending the cards (primarily) just keeps them from being offered to you in study sessions. Those notes [tags are applied at the note level] still exist in your collection, so their tags will be there.

It sounds like you want to reuse some of the tags, so they will still be available for that. If you reorganize/rename them, that will show up on those existing notes as well as any new notes you’re using the tags on.

If you export/delete the deck, the tags will remain, but they will be “unused.” Then you can run Notes > Clear Unused Tags or Tools > Check Database to delete the tags from your list. [Because unused tags aren’t part of sync, you’ll need to run Check Database on your other devices too.]