[Bug]: Tags filter shows presence and count of all tags, including from entries filtered out by other filters

[mrginglymus]

Describe the bug

If a user has an addon that hides certain index entries, tags of those entries will still be included in the tag filter.

This is a mild annoyance at best, but far from ideal if you are trying to use filters to reduce clutter.

In order for this to work, we'd need an API to return the filtered index excluding the filter for the querying addon. I haven't dived into the code too much, so I can't see whether filtering is always done on the fly or stored on filter/index change.

Reproduction link

https://stackblitz.com/edit/github-1hi44lah?file=src%2Fstories%2FButton.stories.ts,.storybook%2Fmanager.ts&preset=node

Reproduction steps

• Go to link above
• See that there is a tag called 'secret'
• Note that when filtering by the 'secret' tag, which claims to have one associated entry, none are shown

System

-

Additional context

No response

[dosubot]

You’ve found a real bug: the tag filter counts in Storybook include tags from all index entries, even those hidden by other filters or addons. This happens because the tag counts are calculated from the full index, not the filtered index, so tags from hidden entries still show up in the filter UI—even if selecting them shows no results. Filtering is performed on the fly, with all active filters applied together to produce a single filtered index, but there’s no API to get a filtered index excluding a specific addon's filter or to compute tag counts based only on visible entries source.

Recent PRs have improved the tag filtering UI and logic, but they don’t address this bug—the tag counts are still based on the full index source. If you want correct tag counts (only for visible entries), Storybook would need to change how it computes and displays tags in the filter panel, likely by using the filtered index instead of the full index.

There’s no built-in workaround right now, but if you’re comfortable customizing Storybook, you could try patching the TagsFilter component to compute tag counts from the filtered index (which is available in the manager API). If you want to follow or contribute to improvements, check out issue #32268 and related PRs for ongoing work on tag filtering.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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