Find images that have been converted to Searchable PDF

DEVONthink
1

Is there a way to create a Smart Group or otherwise find images that have been converted to Searchable PDF?

My use case is that I manually selected a bunch of images from a Smart Group of images (so they are spread out all over the place) and selected “Convert to Searchable PDF”. I had planned to keep the selection and delete the images when the conversions were done.

Interlude: The reason for doing it this way was that I burned myself previously on a Smart Rule while using the trial version which I setup to to the following two steps for about 600 PDFs: 1. OCR, 2 Move to trash. But because I was on the trial version OCR stopped after a short time (limit reached), but the Smart Rule didn’t seem to notice and threw all my non-OCRd PDFs to the trash. Because they came from all over the place, restoring them was kind of a nightmare. So I’m a bit weary about automatically OCR+Trashing now. Would be great if the Smart Rule checked that a step actually completed before moving on or is this already possible somehow?

Anyway, keeping a bunch of notes selected while OCR was running worked well for me previously. But after a bit of work in a separate DT window, when I came back to my image selection the Preview window still said “130 items selected”, but looking in the View panel the notes didn’t seem to be selected, and I was not able to delete them. So now I have a bunch of images that have been OCRd correctly, and I’d like to get rid of the images. I thought of two ways, but I can’t figure out if they’re possible or not:

  1. Create a smart group to find duplicate note titles of all PDF+Text and Images. Then I could perhaps manually delete based on modification date.
  2. Somehow use the fact that the PDFs are generated from the Images (is this metadata/relationship saved anywhere)?

Otherwise I guess I have to write a script or something… :slight_smile:

2

The next release will improve this.

A screenshot would be great.

A smart group using the conditions Kind is PDF and Kind is Picture (Any of them has to be true) might work by sorting the results by name.

You could also use Data > OCR > to searchable PDF in the future and enable the option to move the original to the trash (see Preferences > OCR).

3

First of all: Thank you for the prompt response. Much appreciated!

That is great to hear!

I’m afraid that state is gone, but I’ll post a screenshot if I manage to reproduce it.

That’s a simply and good idea actually. I didn’t even think about sorting by name. Thanks for the suggestion.

Ah great! I actually didn’t think of this even if I’ve looked at that option before.

Thanks again.