Cannot only remove PDF attachments

uyenluong937

I wanted to free up the space by deleting the attached PDF file, and I used:
"Item Type is Attachment + Attachment File Type is PDF" (see the result in the link below)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u16076341/5o4o3018sv2sq2005t4a.png
However, Zotero just keeps including the metadata and the attached PDF, making it impossible to only delete the PDF. Can you solve this? And, if not, do you have any way to delete the PDF (both online and offline) without deleting the metadata?

dstillman

Select All in a Zotero search (quick search or advanced search) will match only the matching rows. Click within that list, press Ctrl-A, and then press Enter, which will select those matching items in the main window. You can then delete them all from there.

(And I assume you know this, but you can set Zotero to stop downloading PDFs from the General pane of the settings.)

uyenluong937

Thank you so much. And yes, I do know that Zotero can stop downloading PDFs but when working on a literature review, I usually toss the whole pdf folder so Zotero can get the metadata.

Is there any way for it not to attach the PDF when I import the PDF files for metadata? Manually inserting DOI is so time-consuming.

dstillman

No, no way to avoid that.