attachements in notes have disappeared

mclebailly

This morning when I started up Zotero, all the attachements (mostly jpg) in my notes seem to have disappeared. The text in the notes is intact, but the pictures have gone. In the notes you can still see where the picture was and to which zotero attachement it relates. After an icon of a broken page it says: zotero://attachement/...
As suggested in another discussion I pasted pictures (thumbnails) in my notes, so I can see them in my reports. I use syncing and a webdav from my company, but I usually am on the same laptop that I use at work as well as at home. I have no clue whatsoever what happened to the attachements and I fear having to cut and paste them again because there are lots of them... Please help, hopefully with a simple solution.

dstillman

As suggested in another discussion I pasted pictures (thumbnails) in my notes, so I can see them in my reports.

Which discussion, exactly?

Pasting images into notes is not something that actually works. There are strange workarounds involving using image links to URLs, but those aren't really supported.

adamsmith

This explains what's going on:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10031/very-unhappy-with-stand-alone-note-taking-side-of-zotero/

and the third one from the bottom here has a viable workaround:
http://www.zotero.org/support/tips_and_tricks

but for now your images in notes are irretrievably gone - sorry!

mclebailly

Well in the following discussion: "Showing pictures in Reports" started by azlab on Apr 14th 2009, which also refers to an older discussion. Anyway, I tried this out, and it worked actually quite well these last few weeks, and was able to make beautiful reports, until this morning... However the pictures only showed up after 'clicking' in the note as if to 'activate' the picure. I don't know how else to describe this. I actually avoided using urls, as I understood from the above mentioned discussion that they involved other disadvantages and aren't supported.

As an historian I need to be able to show pictures in reports in order to prepare an exhibition of historical documents.

Thank you for any solution.

mclebailly

Right, I'll try the tips and tricks solution, although it lookes very much like what I did to get the images in the notes in the first place. Does this mean you have to keep the items attached and not delete them afterwards? Maybe there is my mistake, as I deleted attached pictures, because I thought they were redundant material... And is this a definitive work around? Anyway, I am happy I have kept all the jpg's in a separate folder on my computer.

Thank you so far.

dstillman

Yes, deleting them would be the problem. Zotero notes don't store images internally—they're just links.

mclebailly

Thank you!

adamsmith

and yes, that is a pretty definite workaround - it definitely works on your local computer and should also work with file syncing (but you do need file syncing - if you just sync your data and notes, the synced version won't have the image, though the local version will always have it.)