Dead attachment links after merging and duplicate removal

Smitty_W

Hello,

I recently merged a large number of entries and also ran a duplicate file finder to mass delete the duplicate attachments. The issue I have now is that a great number of entries have links to files, of which only one works, whereas the other file links are dead (since the file in question doesn't exist anymore).

Is there any way to automatize dealing with this? When I try and open an attachment, I need to guess which file is the one that's not broken (and this isn't fixed by just double clicking on the item).

Thank you :)

dstillman

To be clear, we obviously don't recommend just randomly deleting files in the 'storage' folder outside of Zotero. Zotero will also automatically delete attachments that are exact matches when you merge items, so this shouldn't have been necessary.

In any case, you don't need to guess which attachments still have files — the icon will be grayed out if the file doesn't exist. So you can click in the items list, press + to show all child items, and select the missing files down the list. (You could also script this in the Run JavaScript window with `await item.fileExists()`.)