Bulk edit – delete categories from many posts

From the ‘Categories’ tab you can delete all the categories you want. Then from the ‘All Posts’ tab you can bulk re-assign the posts to other categories. As far as I know that’s the only solution.

Thanks. It’s some solution ?? I was looking also for some plugin to mass manage posts, but I didn’t find anything like that.

I have the same problem as Denis. I need to change the defined category on a number of posts, but not all of the ones that are in the category. When using the Bulk Edit function of WordPress (I’m on 3.4.1, but this has been true since the feature was added) it only adds the selected category in addition to the one that was previously applied to the post.

The problem is simple. The bulk editor needs to show the existing category as already checked, so that it can be unchecked, and therefore removed from the posts. I understand the issue, however. If you select multiple posts that have different categories, then there is no simple way to indicate which category is associated with a post.

The potential answer, then, is to have an additional bulk edit feature that simply changes the category. Another approach might be to have a setting that defines the blog installation as monogamous, meaning that it can only apply a single category to a post. I personally think that this is the best approach, considering that we already have tags for deeper differentiation, and most bloggers only use single categories.

Now, you’d think that someone would have developed a plugin to handle this, but I can’t find any that aren’t for much older versions of WP, ala pre-3.x. I did find one that will indiscriminately move all posts in one category to another, but that’s too… brutal. I need a more nuanced capability.

If anyone has any ideas, I’d be more than pleased to hear of them.

Just looking at it intuitively, when I saw that none of the categories were checked, I thought that whatever I had checked or unchecked was what all of the selected posts would have when updated.

Alas, this is not the case. For me, that would be the ideal.

The only plugin that I have found that allows you to have that kind of control is Mass set Categories:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/mass-set-post-categories/

It shows an array of all of your categories at the top and then each of your posts below it in the normal reverse chronological order along with all of the categories for each post. The categories that are currently associated with the posts are checked, and you can check or uncheck what you want and the plugin makes those changes when you click submit, either individually or for a number of posts.

Its biggest drawback is that there is no way to filter or search the posts. So if you have hundreds of posts, you obviously have a very long list to go through. The browser’s search function can be of great help in this regard.