An empty circle means that the attachments is not available locally. Cf. Dan Stillman's post in this thread:
The column is part of the new on-demand download functionality, which is the new default file-syncing mode. The indicator shows you whether you have a file locally or not. (In addition to on-click downloads, there should be a context-menu option to download attachments in batches in case you're going offline, but that hasn't been added yet.)
This is really handy, but having an indication of the number of attachments (and being able to sort the library by number of attachments) was also really handy! Is there any sense of whether the two might be able to co-exist in the future? Perhaps with a column for "Number of Attachments"? Just a thought ...
Yes, I would second that. If you do a search for duplicates and merge two entries both with attachments it is a real pain to find the merged entry and to manually delete one version of the attachment.
(This is the only way I can think of to not have an entry with two identical attachments since you can't delete them in the merging process - would be another usefull thing for future development perhaps.)
Before Ver 4.0 I could manually sort the middle column by numbers of attachments which made it fairly easy (at least in my case, because most entries only have one attachment).
"If you do a search for duplicates and merge two entries both with attachments it is a real pain to find the merged entry and to manually delete one version of the attachment."
I have the exact same issue. I used to merge duplicates and then sort all Zotero items by number of attachments in order to decide which attachment to keep (some may have highlighting and notes, others not). Is there still some way to list according to number of attachments?
sorry, there isn't. Not sure whether the number of attachment column will make it back--I think the more thorough solution is to fix merging to delete identical attachments (which is definitely planned).
That would be a welcome feature, but I will not solve the problem, at least for me. I usually import journal articles with PDFs and they may be different, depending on their source (Project MUSE, JSTOR, EBSCO, etc.) and one of the attachments may have been modified with highlighting or comments by me (or collaborators). Thus, many of the attachments are actually not the same. For those, the problem will persist. For me, this really is a decrease in usability.
That is a great idea! It would be completely sufficient, since the search for (or sorting by) number of attachments is something I (and I presume others who amass considerable amounts of duplicates over times) do regularly, but not often. This function is only needed once in a while in order to determine which items might have multiple attachments so they can be inspected.
In short, yes, a search condition would do what I need and not clutter the IU. I would be very happy, if a future version of Zotero would offer such a condition.
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Thanks for all the great work!
(This is the only way I can think of to not have an entry with two identical attachments since you can't delete them in the merging process - would be another usefull thing for future development perhaps.)
Before Ver 4.0 I could manually sort the middle column by numbers of attachments which made it fairly easy (at least in my case, because most entries only have one attachment).
I have the exact same issue. I used to merge duplicates and then sort all Zotero items by number of attachments in order to decide which attachment to keep (some may have highlighting and notes, others not). Is there still some way to list according to number of attachments?
In short, yes, a search condition would do what I need and not clutter the IU. I would be very happy, if a future version of Zotero would offer such a condition.
Search for or sorting by the # of attachments is a highly desirable feature.