Convert Imported Files to Indexed only?

I’ve been a casual user of Devonthink for awhile now, but I want to start using it more regularly. Most of the files I work with are long academic articles in PDF form, and I’m finding it best to group them very simply and then apply a bunch of tags to each rather than have a complex hierarchy of groups. I just finished this process on hundreds of PDFs before realizing I had imported them all. It didn’t occur to me that I could have just indexed them. Maybe this isn’t too big a deal, but I’d like not to take up all that extra hard drive space duplicating all my PDFs in the database. Is it possible to convert imports to indexes, as it were? Do I do this by exporting the whole thing? Can I index the original folder where I keep all the PDFs, export the contents of the database, and then delete the export? Or would I have to start from scratch? I don’t want to lose all my tags. Also, I don’t want to create problems with broken file links if I start indexing and then move the original files around.

Thanks for the help.

You can move your imported documents back out so that they are indexed, without manually exporting and indexing them. This thread may help, especially the posts made in the last few days.