Will DEVONthink follow the Finder aliases

DEVONthink
1

Hello,

I am designing a research workflow and want to avoid duplicate PDFs. I have a master PDF library and would like to create project-specific research folders containing Finder aliases pointing to the original PDFs.

If I create a DEVONthink database that indexes the project research folder, will DEVONthink follow the Finder aliases and index/search the contents of the linked PDFs?

Does DEVONthink index the target PDF, or does it only see the alias file?

I am not importing the PDFs into DEVONthink; I am asking about indexed files stored elsewhere.

I am currently using ver. 3.9.18

Thank you for your assistance.

2

Why not index the main pdf folder?

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3

Or just trying it out with some dummy files…

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4

Because it has about 92K items in it of which only a tiny subset relates to my writing project.

5

I was going to do that first but thought to ask the experts first. As such an experiemnt may not give consistent or complete results.

If DT cannot follow the alias or a proper index of the original PDF then I will put the original PDF in the project research fold and keep an alias in the original place of my collection. And when the project is finished I will swap them.

6

I think I would go down the route of tagging files rather than moving them or creating aliases. You could tag a load of pdfs as “project 1” or whatever and delete the tags when you have finished.

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7

While indexed aliases are technically possible, it is not recommended. The few people we’ve had that tried this have run into unexpected outcomes.

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8

Thank you. What would be a better solution?

9

If you tagged the relevant pdfs in Finder, you could choose “Index Files” in DT, navigate to the pdf folder, then in the chooser you could select the pdfs with the tag you want and index them in DT. No files would move.

10

Please clarify. What do you mean by “tagged?”

11

Presumably Finder’s File → Tags functionality.

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12

I would put the documents directly in the Finder folder and index that.

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13

Thanks, that was my next plan, which you confirmed.

14

You’re welcome and yes, that’s the safest course of action.

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15

I will put aliases in the original locations, and return the PDFs to those locations when the project is finished.

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