Search annotations of PDFs

Yerha

Annotations can be searchable only if create an item note from the annotations. But this generates a copy of annotations, and it will be unpleasant to maintain the annotation since you need modify twice or more for one annotation. So, could you add search annotations feature? Thank you.

dstillman

You can search for annotation comments using Everything mode in the main search bar. They won't yet show up in the items list, but the parent attachments will.

Yerha

Thank you, this helps me to search annotations. It would be better showing the annotation directly.

sergioruydavid

Can we search only in the annotations using this? I ask because I don't want to see result of my search that come from the articles themselfs, only if the search word appears in a annotation. Thanks

phamdn

Please add searching annotations only. I will be very helpful. Thanks

elbhagwandeen

Since I use the annotations feature heavily on iPad, I was hoping to be able to retrieve the text or the color code of the annotations in search. I'd like my in-text annotations of pdf to show as child items of the pdfs --even if this was just optional for other users. This would make Zotero come out ahead of all the other bib man tools i've tried

agam2222

Hello @elbhagwandeen Hope you are all well
As a work around, you can try using better note plugin as some of its templates help to collect annotations by colors or tags .
https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-better-notes
Hope this helps

larmarange

+1

Adding a way to search through annotations of multiple documents at once would clearly transform Zotero as a perfect tool for QDA

phamdn

I second this. Searching all annotations is very useful

kassiansun

While that we can't query and list all annotations in the beautiful Zotero panel, if you know how to manipulate the zotero database (SQLite files), I came up with a SQL query to dump the data so you can visualize with any tabular tools:

```
select v.value as item, ia.text, ia.comment, ipa.path, i.dateAdded, i.dateModified from itemAnnotations ia
left join items i on ia.itemID = i.itemID
left join itemAttachments ipa on ia.parentItemID = ipa.itemID
left join items ipp on ipa.parentItemID = ipp.itemID
left join itemData d on d.itemID = ipp.itemID and d.fieldID = 1
left join itemDataValues v on d.valueID = v.valueID;
```

A preview of this query:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u13149516/94w8iwhqcnvuyxihs0ds.png