If you have ever wondered where your tags are or didn’t know each of your DEVONthink databases has its own Inbox, or maybe felt like you’re getting lost scrolling to find groups, you should know about unified elements. Unified items gather some items of the same type in the Navigate sidebar, the leftmost pane on a main window. This is similar to how Apple Mail, for instance, has Inboxes in its Favorites sections. Toggle unified elements in DEVONthink’s Settings > General > Interface > Sidebar.
Unify Inboxes and Tags
Every database has its own Inbox and Tags group. If they aren’t unified, these appear alongside the other groups in the database. Enable Unify inboxes and all inboxes, including the Global Inbox, are collected in the Globals > Inboxes section. Enable Unify tags and all Tags groups appear in Globals > Tags.
When Inboxes and/or Tags are unified, clicking on those top-level items in the Globals section displays a union of the contents of every Inbox or Tags group it contains. Click the disclosure triangle to only access items of individual, open databases.
Unify Databases
When databases are unified, they are listed in the Open Databases section and can all be expanded there — the databases and their groups are all unified in one sidebar section.
Disabling this option does two things: (1) Open databases’ names are shown in Open Databases giving you quick access to the root of each database, and (2) a section for the selected database appears in the sidebar, listing only the groups in that database, isolating its groups.
Unify Elements in DEVONthink To Go
For mobile users, in DEVONthink To Go you can unify Inboxes or Tags via the View Options button (with three descending lines) on the databases screen or in Settings > Interface & Chat.
Nice to know about this functionality. Any pointers on how to clean up a tag “jungle”? There are duplicates, typos, capitalisation differences that could be simplified through some librarian catalog type maintenance.
Beyond the maintenance, I’d also like to know how to document usage of tags, clusters of tags developing in usage, relationships of tags to related items from the “see also” list.
E.g. select two or more duplicate tags (in the sidebar or item list) and use the command Tools > Merge Tags. Note that the tags have to be located in the same database. The names of the original tags are added to the aliases of the merged tag so that any similar typo in the future will use this tag instead of creating a new one.
Scripting might be able to handle this but it’s hard to tell without knowing your tags. MCP (e.g. Claude Cowork) might be another option but in that case I would definitely recommend backups first
You mean for reorganizing the tags? I used simple prompts. Something like: “in my database xyz, analyze the tags structure, indicate duplicates, find tags with the typos, and overall suggest tags based on the documents; do not change anything before confirming with me first”.
Something like that. My prompts are not sophisticated, but Claude did a great job
I’ve tried the manual approach at first. That’s what the help AI-chat recommended actually. It involves selecting duplicate tags in the sidebar and merging them. I can fix spelling and capitalisation errors there immediately. It works, I’m done. Good.
No! I cannot figure out why the tags in sidebar are consolidated now, but the tags in the item list are not. Nor do I see any way to merge tags in the item list.
For example, on the right the tag #2024 exists four times. I’d like to consolidate the four different tags as one “#2024” tag, but I cannot figure out how that could be possible.
I have 2299 tags apparently, with many duplicates like this. Simplifying the tags would help me, right?
Tags are per database. So, you have #2024 in “Research”, and possibly in three other databases.
There’s no way to reduce this to just one tag without losing tags in three databases.
If that is right or not depends on what you mean by “help me”. If it makes you feel better to see fewer duplicate tags in your global Tags group, you should turn off “Unified tags” in your global preferences. That’s under General/Appearance/Sidebar. And there are several paragraphs in the manual concerning “Unified tags” (and “Unified Inboxes”, for that matter).
