Trying to abandon the Zotero Webpage Snapshots

KevinMoses

I wanted to continue using Zotero but end the storage of webpage snapshots using WebPageDump, e.g. one webpage … 3.14 MB, 76 files. I felt the grab all method was such a waste of space. So, I have just implemented the following workflow and was wondering if anyone had come up with a better approach or saw problems with the workflow. I can still generate a bibliography.

I capture a webpage with Zotero, e.g., a NYTimes article, I then delete the stored webpage snapshot (emptied Zotero trash), then attached a .pdf of the article to the Zotero item. The creation of the .pdf, went like this: I cleaned up the webpage trinkets with Safari Reader, then printed to Adobe .pdf. I saved the .pdf in a file structure I had created in my Zotfile folder, e.g., Zotfile Folder>NYTimes>2014, then linked the .pdf to the Zotero item.

I am kind of waiting for something to go wrong with this, I certainly do not know enough about Zotero, any suggestions welcome,

adamsmith

it's obviously a bit cumbersome, but I don't see anything going wrong with this, so you should be fine.

KevinMoses

Thanks, and thanks for being so fast on the response,

bwiernik

Try using Pocket. With this tool, you can save websites to your Pocket account, where they are automatically cleaned up like the Safari Reader view. You can then save the Pocket version of the website to Zotero in the normal way. File sizes should be much smaller. The downside to this approach is that the URL field of the website item will be wrong (it will be the Pocket address, rather than the original one), but changing this field should be a lot less cumbersome than needing to delete a snapshot, save a pdf, and attach a link.

thisisjoe

This is exactly what I wanted to do. Rather than grabbing a webpage with separate files for image, html, css,... it would be wonderful if Zotero can automatically convert the web page into pdf and then attach the pdf rather than the original webpage. I am going to create a feature request thread for that.

adamsmith

No need to create separate feature request threads. Devs read every thread. I doubt this is going to happen, though, webpage/PDF conversion isn't anywhere good enough to server as a replacement.

dstillman

Continued: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/40673/