Script to mass remove tags

Having seen many requests for scripts to mass remove tags, I thought I would share the following. However, it is responds to a particularly odd problem, so I’m not sure how widely useful it will be.

I had an unfortunate encounter with the program “Doo”, which automatically added a few hundred Open-Meta tags to my files, including a bunch of PDFs that I have indexed. Of course, DT converted the OM tags into its own tags, so my nice neat tagging system was polluted with these hundreds of junk tags. But, I couldn’t just remove all the tags, as the PDFs also had been tagged with non-junk tags I wanted to keep. Thus, the included code.

The user selected one or more tags and invokes the script. Each selected tag is then removed from EVERY record to which it has been applied. Other tags should not be affected, but I’m not promising anything. Thereafter, the user may delete the now empty tags if he or she wishes.

The basic mechanism I used is to move the replicants from each selected tag group to the trash, which is the same as removing the tag. One could use delete instead of moving to the trash, but I like the second chance created by a pause in the trash.

(* 
Remove these tags - Removes a selected set of tags from ALL records so tagged.  Should leave other tags alone.


Copyright © 2013, Glenn Hoetker <Glenn.Hoetker@asu.edu>
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tell application "DEVONthink Pro"
	activate
	set selectedTags to the selection
	if selectedTags is {} then error "Please select some tags."
	
	repeat with thisTag in selectedTags
		set theRecords to children of thisTag
		repeat with theRecord in theRecords
			move record theRecord from thisTag to the trash group of the database of theRecord
		end repeat
	end repeat
end tell

One lesson I learned is in the line


move record theRecord from thisTag to the trash group of the database of theRecord

The “from thisTag” part is critical. Otherwise, all copies of the record get trashed, which is NOT what we want.

This is clever – thanks for posting it.

A question. Why wouldn’t it be simpler to just delete the “polluted” tag from the Tags group?

Also, could you rename your post to something related to the topic? I’m afraid that anyone looking for this in the future would never think to look for a post whose title is your handle. Thanks!

THANK YOU!!!

That is a real time saver.