Transferring tags on items from Pocket and/or Mendeley

I’ve used Pocket and Mendeley for my document sources so far. I’m trying to move my workflow as much as possible to DEVONthink. I am looking for a way to transfer the tags attached to Pocket or Mendeley items to DEVONthink. That is, attach them to the same item as they were originally in the previous apps. It would be of a great help and doing it manually for thousands of items seems rather daunting. Thank you in advance if you know any ideas that can help!

Welcome @alex2

Are you referring to the web interface of Mendeley?

Note: Automation of web apps to desktop apps is not a trivial matter.

Mendeley has also a desktop app, which I primarily use.

I’ll have to see if it’s scriptable or not.

Nope… it isn’t directly scriptable. It may be able to process underlying data but I don’t know much about the app at this point.

Solving it for Pocket would actually be most valuable to me. A script posted here transfers the items themselves, but not their tags: “Pocket to Devonthink

I would bump that post or PM the author of that script.

1 Like

I’ve managed to create a csv file with the tags and run this script How to import CSV of URLS as Web Archives (with Tags)?. It works fine, but I would like to add the original creation date (I already put it in the csv as item 3)

How is the date formatted in the CSV?

Open Script Editor and run this code using the date you entered…

set myDate to "" -- Put the date you entered in the CSV
set convertedDate to (date myDate)

What does it report?

date "Tuesday, 29 January 2019 at 07:28:55"

The date comes in Unix timestamp; I converted it in excel to this format before saving it to csv.

So you have the dates in the CSV entered like this: date "Tuesday, 29 January 2019 at 07:28:55" ?

Tuesday, 29 January 2019 at 07:28:55

so without date and the quotes.

Hold the Option key and choose Help > Report bug to start a support ticket and please attach the CSV file you’re working with. Thanks!

@alex2 @BLUEFROG I just installed DTOP and am trying it out as a way to find connections among many PDFs and webpage snippets, to support my research for academic writing.

Like @alex2 I am already deeply invested in a citation manager program–in my case it is Mendeley. I already have all my PDFs there tagged. I would love to get my tags from Mendeley into DTOP. I read with great interest your exchange in this thread, but I am unsure how to do something similar. I’m just not that familiar with what you describe as the process or with what is described here in the thread you point to called [How to import CSV of URLS as Web Archives (with Tags)?]

@alex2 did you eventually get this to work from Mendeley? Or would either of you be willing to break this down for me a bit more? I’d appreciate it very much. I can tell it would seem very basic, but I am just not familiar. I don’t even get the first step, of generating a CSV of my Mendeley entries…the only export function I see in Mendeley–>File just lets you export .bib etc

Any help appreciated! Thanks so much!

Apparently, DT3 can work with Bibtex. There are some threads in this forum on the topic, so may be that could help.

Thanks for this tip @chrillek . I wasn’t sure what Bibtex was, but tried out making a list of items in Mendeley that shared the same tag I gave them all. I exported a bibtex list of them, and then imported that as a sheet in DT3. The see also matched all those articles in the db in DT3 where I have it index my PDF folder that Mendeley puts things into.

So this is a way I can at least relate all the tags I invested time into making in Mendeley and find the related items in DT3 and let its AI make suggestions of other articles that relate to one I perhaps failed to tag. I’ll have to re-do this step periodically (unless someone knows how to automate that–I’m not very familiar with scripts and such), but at least I can establish some crossover.
SD

I did not succeed with Mendeley. I eventually stopped using Mendeley altogether in favor of Zotero. Mendeley encrypts the database and as a user you also don’t have an access to it. What also annoyed me at Mendeley is that you cannot list the untagged items. Zotero does have that which allowed me to make sure all my sources are tagged.

The way I integrated it with DT3 was to put all pdfs into a single folder and then index that folder in DT3. So to make selections based on tags I use the bibliographic software and to do regular word searches I use DT3.