purge duplicate PDFs in Zotfile organized directory on a Mac

somainer

Using standalone Zotero for the Mac, I installed Zotfile so as to rename PDFs (author, year, title) and organize them in a directory outside of the usual Zotero storage folder... Everything went fine, but perhaps due to some mistakes when I merged database entries or who knows what, I see that I now have some duplicates (in some cases triplicates) of certain PDFs in the Zotfile organized directory. Within Zotero, this shows up as two (or more) links associated with an entry in my database (with essentially the same name, except a different number at the end).

Does anyone know of either
1) an automated way in Zotero to purge these duplicate PDFs; or
2) a search expression that I can use to find them within advanced search - so that I could manually trash extra PDFs (right-click on link and select "Move item to trash")

adamsmith

Merging duplicate items currently duplicates attachments if both items have attachments (in general, changing that is planned, but it's not entirely trivial, as you may have annotations in one or even both attachments) . Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good way to purge the or even search for them. Number of attachments is not a search variable.

GrantJ

I’d like to see the option to right-click an attachment and be offered a manual “Delete this attachment” option. (It might be appropriate to warn users that the copy on the disk will be removed.)

Using this—in the case of merging entries—a user can go to the collection, select Duplicates, and before merging the entries identify for themselves which of the duplicate PDFs they wish to discard, delete it, *then* apply the merge.

Another simple thing Zotero could do is to alert the user if they try merge entries that will leave them with more than one of any particular type of attachment, e.g. a PDF file, a PubMed Link, a PubMed Entry, etc., asking them if they’d like to delete unwanted duplicate attachments first. (You can see how this would allow more rapid merging for those of us with the odd duplicated attachment.)

(You could take this one step further and query users if they look to be trying to delete the last of any one type of attachment in a merge group as a safety feature.)

Used outside of merging, just in general use, being able to delete attachments may also allow users to replace an attachment with a new version by deleting the original, then adding the new attachment. (Ideally this would want a more flexible Attach New File option, but I can explain that later.)

(Resolving this is a nuisance to me as I’m trying to free up disk space but there seems no practical way to do get rid of 'extra' PDFs files that been accumulated in Zotero currently yet it seems to me that basic manual functionality would be easy to add. [I’m a coder, BTW.])