Upgrade StorageHow to delete mere attachments from Zotero Storage
Hello fellow users of Zotero,
In the past few months, I have been using the BrowZine app to consult some online journals. Because I have it connected with Zotero, I can upload an interesting article directly to my Zotero Web Library.
Over time, I have uploaded a lot of interesting articles with BrowZine to my Web Library. Normally, BrowZine will upload the item/metadata of the article. When it can also download the article itself/the document, it will upload this document as an attachment to that metadata/article. Over time, my free Zotero Storage has become to almost full, and I would like to mere delete the attachments from my Zotero Storage.
Because I have already synced my Web Library with Zotero on my desktop, these attachments are already downloaded to the desktop client of Zotero 7 ('up-to-date' Zotero over flatpak for F41). I have also used my preferred search engine, to find answers to my question. However, those where asked and answered to even years ago. Thus I just wonder: does mere purging my Zotero Web Library does this job? As in, when I purge my Zotero Web Library, does it only deletes the attachments from my Zotero Storage, without deleting/purging the metadata/items too? Or is there another preferred way to delete the attachments alone from my Zotero Storage?
Although some parts of my question have already been asked and answered, I am still asking it, because those have been asked years ago. Thus I am asking if this is still the preferred way to delete the attachments alone from my Zotero Storage for the current Zotero.
Thanks in advanced,
86ul
In the past few months, I have been using the BrowZine app to consult some online journals. Because I have it connected with Zotero, I can upload an interesting article directly to my Zotero Web Library.
Over time, I have uploaded a lot of interesting articles with BrowZine to my Web Library. Normally, BrowZine will upload the item/metadata of the article. When it can also download the article itself/the document, it will upload this document as an attachment to that metadata/article. Over time, my free Zotero Storage has become to almost full, and I would like to mere delete the attachments from my Zotero Storage.
Because I have already synced my Web Library with Zotero on my desktop, these attachments are already downloaded to the desktop client of Zotero 7 ('up-to-date' Zotero over flatpak for F41). I have also used my preferred search engine, to find answers to my question. However, those where asked and answered to even years ago. Thus I just wonder: does mere purging my Zotero Web Library does this job? As in, when I purge my Zotero Web Library, does it only deletes the attachments from my Zotero Storage, without deleting/purging the metadata/items too? Or is there another preferred way to delete the attachments alone from my Zotero Storage?
Although some parts of my question have already been asked and answered, I am still asking it, because those have been asked years ago. Thus I am asking if this is still the preferred way to delete the attachments alone from my Zotero Storage for the current Zotero.
Thanks in advanced,
86ul
If I understand you correctly, you want to completely delete all the items that are just files, not attached to an item?
For that, you can sort by item type in the middle panel and then delete all the items classified as "attachment"
To ask/say the very same, but a bit more technical: BrowZine loads the item up to Zotero Web Library. It does this by uploading the meta as a parent, and adds the retrieved article itself as a child item/attachment to this parent item.
When I have downloaded these new items to my desktop, I would like to delete all child items/attachments from the Web Library, as I have these (parent with child) items already on my Desktop.
In case your advice is still valid, then I will delete all child items/ attachments from my Web Library, to empty the my Web Storage.
What you could do is use something like Zotmoov to convert local items to links (which would remove them from remote storage and place them in some custom location on your local machine)
Because I would like to delete the attachments from the Web Library only, but not from my Local Library (Desktop), I would like to do something that is not (yet) possible.
Besides the workaround with Zotmoov, I do think there is also another workaround possible: Exporting the items with their attachment, delete these items (including their attachments) from my Library, and import these again to my Local Library, by allowing to sync only the parent items (meta data) to my Web Library, without syncing their child items/their attachments (the article itself) to the Web Library.
With the (hopeful) result to have both the parent/meta and the child/attachment/article only on my Local Library, and only the parent/meta on my Web Library...
The point of syncing is to make all data and files available on all devices.