Tags and merging

Tags are your own labels for grouping books in ways locations and genres can’t express — "first editions", "signed copies", a "to-sell" pile. Each tag has a name and a color, and a book can carry as many as you like.

1. Open a book you own and find the Tags section (below its copies) — tap "Add tag" to assign an existing tag or create a new one on the spot (name + color).
2. Filter your whole library to a tag from Filters → Tags in the library toolbar; the count and stats narrow to that tag too, and it combines with location, genre, and the other filters.
3. Manage all your tags — rename, recolor, or delete — from My Library → Library tools → Books → Manage tags. Deleting a tag warns you how many books will lose it and never deletes the books themselves.

Tags are private to you — each person’s tags are their own, so a tag you add isn’t visible to other members of the same library. Admins can also publish a public showcase scoped to one of their tags.

Imports and quick typing leave spellings behind — "Study", "study", and "The Study" as three locations, or "signed" and "Signed copies" as two tags. In Library Setup, every location already shows how many copies it holds and how many including what is inside it. Merge… lets you tick the spellings to fold together and choose which one stays: the fullest is preselected, and the dialog says in plain words what will happen — how many copies move, how many shelves come along, which entries are deleted, and that the deleted ones’ expected counts are dropped. Everything that pointed at a merged location — copies, kept shelf photographs, showcases — now points at the survivor.

A merge is refused, before anything changes, when the survivor sits inside one of the locations being merged (it would end up inside itself), or when the survivor’s kind cannot hold what a merged location contains — a shelf cannot become the parent of a bookshelf’s shelves. Tags work the same way on the Tags page: the survivor gains every book the merged tags were on, a book that carried two of them is counted once, and the merged tags are deleted. Clean up unused removes, after confirmation, locations with no copies, nothing inside, and no kept photograph — and tags on no book.

Merging is final: the merged entries are deleted, the dialog says they cannot be restored, and Library activity does not offer to undo a merge — the only way back is to move copies again. Author names are not mergeable here. An author is part of the shared book record that every library holding that book sees, so a spelling is corrected through the book page’s edit flow, where it is reviewed, rather than from Library Setup.

Merging and cleaning up locations needs the same permission as creating or renaming one. Tags are private to whoever made them, so only your own tags can be merged.