Relocate Masters

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi all,

I’m using Devonthink to run a database for my history phd dissertation research.

I’ve been dealing with thousands of photo files of archive documents that I’ve been importing, renaming, and sorting in Apple’s Aperture, before I index them in DevonThink (storing the actual files on an external hard drive outside the database file itself).

Thus far, I’ve been importing PDFs of papers and other such docs directly into Devonthink (often by saving to the “inbox” folder in finder as I download the papers while browsing the web).

I was wondering if there’s some sort of way to “relocate masters” as in Apple’s Aperture for the PDFs. That is, is there a single command I can use in DevonThink to export masters of the PDF out of the database, index those newly exported files, and delete the old files that were in the database file? Aperture’s ability to do this has really made managing all my photos easy, and I was wondering if there is some similar feature in Devonthink.

Thanks in advance for your help.

2

Beginning with version 2.0.5 of DT Pro/Office, there’s an included script that enables one to convert an Index-captured database to an Import-captured database. I’ve tried it and it worked for a relatively small test database. (But as always, before running this on an important database, especially a large one, first make a complete backup copy of the database!)

I’m not aware of an existing procedure to do a one-pass operation such as that requested by hmalik.

Perhaps the conversion script noted above might give expert scripters some hints on how to create such a procedure.