Saving PDFs as Zotero Items from Dropbox

sandylocks

After weeks of trying I accidentally stumbled onto a feature that I should have retained but now I've lost it. I was saving items from my dropbox and I suddenly saw a menu itemt hat allowed me to save the item and retract metadata for Zotero. I was delighted and really started moving through my library. I then got distracted, and now I can't figure out how it was done. I don't see the menu item anymore when I click "save" or anything else. Can anyone help? I've now wasted about a day trying to get the menu back.

I was working in Firefox. I also had Citelighter up, and had the option of saving first in Zotero and then going into Citeligher to take notes.

adamsmith

The "Save to Zotero" option appears in Firefox's generic download dialog for PDFs. You can trigger that e.g. by clicking "download" at the top right of FF's built in PDF viewer. If you want it to appear for all PDFs (instead of opening them in Firefox) you may have to play with the PDF settings for Firefox - setting the option for PDFs under "Applications" in the FF preferences to "Save File" instead of "Preview in Firefox" should do that, though the application settings for FF are often a bit finnicky.

Bazman76

I want to copy pdf files from Dropbox (which I had been using to archive my files till now) to Zotero.

I did what you said above changing the PDF setting in Firefox and then using open with to open the pdf in Firefox but all I got was this:

file:///C:/Users/ocuk/Dropbox/Nelson%20Siegel/Constrained%20Bayes%20and%20Empirical%20Bayes%20Estimation%20with%20Balanced%20Loss%20Functions.pdf

which just displays a black page?

More generally I would like to be able to transfer all my pdf's from Dropbox to Zotero en masse ideally keeping the folder structure in tact is this possible?

adamsmith

The answer above was very specific to the questions. The OP had almost certainly been opening PDFs from her online Dropbox page, not locally.

To import PDFs from your dropbox folder, you will have to re-create the folder structure manually (as a collection structure) in Zotero if you want to keep it. Then move to a collection, select "store copy of file" under the green plus sign in Zotero, select all the files in the corresponding folder in your Dropbox folder (using shift+click), which will import the PDFs into Zotero.

You can then use the "retrieve metadata" option for small-ish batches of PDFs. Note that if you do too many too quickly you'll get locked out by google and have to wait:
http://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata