Hi Friends,
I just learned this from a tutorial by Aussie Carolyn on her blog [ur=http://www.cuttwopieces.com/l]Cut Two Pieces[/url] (which is mostly about using home/craft digital cutting machines, but also about using Inkscape with them). I discovered a small trove of tutorials there, and am in the process of adding them to our home page here (
Inkscape Tutorials). (For some reason, the site's not listed in search engines, which is why I had not found it until now.)
Anyway, here's the trick. If you have a whole bunch of clones which you need to unlink (for example, numerous clones made with Tile Clones dialog); instead of unlinking 1 by 1, or even selecting all the clones, and doing it all at once, all you need to do is delete the original object, and it breaks all the links at once!
Although if you still need the original object for anything else, you'll want to duplicate it first. Duplicating does not cause the duplicate to be linked to the clones, like with the original. (Although one might think logically it might. But it doesn't.)
So here's the routine, if you don't know which object is the original:
1 - select 1 clone
2 - press Shift key + D
3 - delete
4 - done - all clones' links are broken, and now they are all individual objects
Here's a convenient file, so you can test
