How do you mass export pdfs to a directory?

shivohum
Like if I have 200 references in a collection, and say 180 of them have PDFs attached, I just want to be able to select all 200 and somehow extract all the associated PDFs and be able to copy them to some other folder on my hard drive.

How would I do that? Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    There's an "Export PDFs" option in the File menu (I'm currently in Zotero 7beta, but I'm pretty sure that option is available in 6).
  • shivohum
    Huh. It appears to be buggy. Seems to have left out a lot of the PDFs from articles I selected.
  • adamsmith
    a) it takes a while without visible progress bar if you are including annotations
    b) it only includes files present locally
  • shivohum
    Strange -- I'm selecting all documents in a collection which clearly contains hundreds of PDFs. It's only outputting 50-some. If I specifically select, by itself, a reference which I know has a PDF that wasn't outputted... then I get the PDF. Any idea what's going on?
  • adamsmith
    Are you including annotations? And if so, how long are you waiting?
  • shivohum
    When I export using File-->Export PDFs there's no option to include annotations... (and I don't have any annotations anyhow, actually).

    And even after waiting several hours this problem seems to be the case.
  • adamsmith
    Which version of Zotero is this, which OS? This is a newer function, so it's certainly possible it has bugs at scale.
  • shivohum
    6.0.30 on OS X Sonoma 14.1.1
  • dstillman
    (We'll be making some changes around this, but there's no "Include Annotations" option for "Export PDFs" currently — that always includes annotations, since just dragging attachments to a filesystem folder gives the unmodified file.)

    @shivohum: Can you provide a Debug ID for an export that's not including all files?
  • shivohum
    Sure -- Debug id is D2007537608
  • dstillman
    OK, and what's the 8-character folder name from right-click → Show File for a file that's missing from the export?
  • shivohum
    NU6SXBHN is one of them
  • dstillman
    Ah, sorry, there's a bug in Zotero 6 where Export PDFs will stop if it encounters a file that's missing locally. This is fixed in the Zotero 7 beta. You can either look for a missing file (grayed-out attachment icon in the items list) and fix/avoid that file or switch to the Zotero 7 beta for the export.
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