Hi,
I’m trying to get rid of a bunch (> 150K) of tags that have been auto-created upon addition through following RSS posts.
Trying to follow this interestingly similar post by fellow denizens of these forums
I found that the added tags are all 36 characters long. (pasted a couple in gsheet and applied formula =LEN(cell address))
Hence I thought the easiest way was to remove all tags with length = 36.
I then set out to create a rule to try to achieve this.
I’ve tried a couple of different settings at “Perform the following actions:”
On Demand
On Startup
However nothing seems to happen, so my question is “What am i doing wrong?”
Then the next step / issue:
I have my DB’s synced over a couple of macs.
To start with I have disabled sync for this particular DB.
Am I correct in following reasoning:
first fix rule to get rid of excessive tags
apply rule to delete tags
then, on syncstore, delete the related DB (and later do the same on all macs syncing this DB)
once tag issue is solved, re-enable sync, uploading from the curated DB
on other macs, re-enable sync and download from syncstore
Thanks for helping out!
P.S.
FYI: What also happened previously is that all these 36 char tags were synced as "Finder"tags…
This resulted in bringing my 2013 Mac Pro with 12 core cpu and 64 GB of ram to its knee’s…
I had to manually remove all thes thousands and thousands of tags.
Then I applied the hidden preference to disable Devonthink sync of tags to “Finder tags”
Here is a small teaching edition script that will remove tags of 36 characters from the current database…
tell application id "DNtp"
set currentDB to current database -- Process only the current database
set allTags to (every parent of currentDB whose (tag type is ordinary tag)) -- Get only ordinary tags
repeat with thisTag in allTags -- Loop through the list of tags
if (count (name of thisTag as string)) = 36 then -- Check the length and only process those that match
move record thisTag to trash group of currentDB -- Put the tag group into the database's Trash
end if
end repeat
end tell
You will still need to empty the database’s Trash afterwards.
Due to trying to get old hardware to work back again, I forgot all about this pitfall and stumbled back in… unfortunately
So here are a couple of thoughts / questions anno Thursday 4 August 2022:
The same script does not seem to work anymore today? I get an error: AppleEvent timed out
What I do at the moment, is have the script open in Script Editor and then manually run it (by pressing the “play” button)
What am I doing wrong?
What does it take to get this script back to working?
Are there any scripts available to achieve the same, but not within DTPO but in the Finder?
The way I realized what was wrong and that triggered my memory, is that
a) the mac gets really slow and sluggish
b) Activity Monitor shows openAndSavePanelService related various applications
At the moment I need to do this by opening Finder Preferences > Tags pane, then using manually shift/cmd select all the wrong tags and delete them…
I don’t know of any such scripts. My best bet would be the find command in a terminal. But I don’t know if Apple’s version of it supports filtering by extended attributes.
Perhaps a spotlight search could help. Spotlight does permit to search for meta data, but I don’t that you can limit the search for tags with a certain length.
Hi, thanks for your reply.
I found jdberry / tag on github that seems maybe helpfull.
But I could not easily understand how to search / define “number of characters = 36”
I’m also searching the Automators forum.
Will update if I find anything.
