Yes, I’m clear on your point. Development would have to assess the change in behavior.
Outside of having them shown in red - which indicates normal replicants - what visual cue do you feel would be sufficient?
Thank you for your openness regarding this. Well, IMO a very simple yet powerful visual mark beside the colour would be showing its name (the replicants) in Italic - and only the original files in standard font. Or is this being used elsewhere already? What do you think?
No problem!
Replicants are already shown in red italics.
Actually, I just noticed a distinction.
A normal file in the Trash has a strikethrough.
A trashed tag replicant does not.
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Oh, how interesting! You are right. I didn’t know that! Actually this is something I can work and live with. 
This “feature” is absolutely sufficient to me. Thank you! 
Excellent and I’m glad it works for you. Cheers and welcome to the forums! 
Thanks. I’m quite new to DEVONthink as you can guess, I’ve been using it only for a couple of months now, but already it appears to be super handy for me. Needed this tool for years and didn’t know it existed, haha.
You’re welcome and glad to hear you’re finding it useful!
Hi Bluefrog
As always, your comments are extremely helpful. I have only just fallen on this topic, but, in fact, I find myself a little confused.
I had always assumed that replicants (unlike duplicates) were just aliases. But a quick test seemed to show me that when I deleted a replicant, and then searched for it in trash, the replicant was of the same size as the “original”. (So if every item in a database had a replicant, the database would double in size?). I had also assumed that a tag was a kind of alias, too.
Does this mean that if all the items in a database are given four tags, the database multiplies in size by five? Even if the tags are only applied to parent groups?
I now find myself a bit nervous about deleting tag groups in case the original goes too. Never seemed to happen to me, mind you. Is there perhaps a quick way to remove tags instead of deleting them, bearing in mind that removing tags one at a time is very slow?
Here’s my understanding
Regarding the “original”, there is a data record stored in the database
There are pointers to this record; if more than one pointer, they are all called replicants; there’s no “original” pointer
And yes, all these replicants indicate the same size record; they are all pointing to the same data record
Thanks for your kind words! 
A replicant consumes no more space than one instance of the file.
It isn’t duplicated in any way, so there is no second (or third or fourth…) file created. There is just an instance of one file existing in more than one location. All replicants are the same file. That’s why a change on one changes them all. You’re technically only changing one file.
Does this mean that if all the items in a database are given four tags, the database multiplies in size by five? Even if the tags are only applied to parent groups?
Not at all. Again, replicants consume no more space than one file.
I now find myself a bit nervous about deleting tag groups in case the original goes too. Never seemed to happen to me, mind you.
Which is why you shouldn’t be nervous about it.
Is there perhaps a quick way to remove tags instead of deleting them, bearing in mind that removing tags one at a time is very slow?
You don’t delete a tag group unless you’re removing that tag from the database and its application to any files in that database with the tag.
Is this what you’re referring to?
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On a related note - is there any way (I suspect there can’t be; and don’t want to hijack this thread) that I can have one colour label when one replicant is in one top level group and another colour when it’s in another, please?
No worries!
And sorry but no this is not possible. A replicant is an instance of a single file so making an edit to one instance will always affect the other instances.
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That’s what I was 99.99% sure of, Jim. Thanks.
If there were ever a way to do what I asked, I’d truly appreciate it: I’m meticulous in adhering to a labelling convention which distinguishes each of my seven (the maximum number possible because of an OS limitation, I know) top levels by colour.
And - as is inevitable - one in each pair of Replicants will always have the wrong colour for its parent (or more likely, because of the fanatical way I arrange my folders and Groups, great-great-great grandparent etc!).
A good thing to be able to do would be to make a Smart Group which detected all items whose labels didn’t correspond to their top level for that reason.
Possible, please?
Thank you DTLow. This nicely explains things. The pointers show the record size when shown in the trash can, but it is only the pointer that is deleted. That makes complete sense.
Thanks again BLUEFROG. I was thrown by the fact that replicants in the trash can point to the size of the actual data, rather than the size of the pointer which is near zero. Now it makes sense. Thank you.
You’re welcome 
sorry to open up this can of worms again, but I’m not quite getting it… I have a ton of tags that I’m not sure where they were created, seems they might have been autocreated in another app (or in DT?). They don’t seem to be replicants either. I did a little test on a file I didn’t need. I deleted the tag and then emptied the trash, and the file was gone. I have hundreds of these and wants to get rid of them and clean up my tags, but not my files. Reading the above, I’m not 100% sure what the intended behavior is or was or if things have been updated since. Or how the files in the trash look when an actual file or not. Would anyone mind summarizing the above?
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Did you ever get an answer to this?
I have the same problem from it pulling in files of images that have a ton of tags on them already… Trying to clean up the tags (not sure if needs needed or not)
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@egoldy it might be a good idea to create a new thread that explains your problem. This thread is old and (in my opinion) got far too many posts. It’s of course just a suggestion
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The easiest option is Tools > Batch Processing… using the Remove Tags action. Or a similar smart rule if you’d like to automate this e.g. after importing.
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