Comment 6 for bug 534651

Let me clear up some confusion here. This is how emblems work.

All emblem information is stored in the gvfs database. This metadata is queryable through the standard GLib file information querying techniques. On the command line, this can be achieved by using gvfs-info. The emblems are an entry in the "metadata::" database. To query all of the emblems currently set for a particular file, use:

gvfs-info -a "metadata::emblems" <file>

Note that you can also use a wildcard to query all of the keys in the metadata namespace, simply use "metadata::*"

Via the command line, you are also able to set attributes, using gvfs-set-attribute <file> metadata::some-key "A metadata value"

I agree that it would be a good idea for docky to only display emblems that exist in the current icon theme.