Moving Whole Collections from Group to Personal Library

jah1147

Hi, Sorry if I am in the wrong place (first time posting)

I have been using the Zotero Groups feature as a way to easily access particular files on a number of different machines. I am now done with one of those collections and want to move it to my normal, personal library on my computer (and free up some online storage).

So I made a collection and manually dragged each folder from the Group to my personal library. All the entries copied fine, but the tags and notes did not- and in some cases, neither did the pdfs. It is a lot of articles (a hundred or so), many with notes and highlights in the pdf, so I need everything to be the same as it was. Is it possible to do this? What am I doing wrong? Thanks for the help!

adamsmith

There's two things to check:

1. In the General tab of the Zotero preferences, there are checkboxes for which information to include when copying items between libraries. Make sure they're all checked

2. (This is something that will be improved in the future, but you'll have to deal with it--if it applies--for now). When you copy items between libraries, they maintain an invisible collection and you can't, actually, copy the item back if the original item still exists. Example: You create an item in "My Library". Copy it over to a group. Add a PDF, tags, notes. When you try to copy that item back to "My Library" that won't work at all. You'll just see the old version. The only way to do this is to delete the original item in "My Library", empty the Zotero trash for My Library, and then copy.

jah1147

Thanks for the help. Everything was checked in Preferences-General, but #2 does make sense now. The problem entries I noticed had been in my library previously and perhaps reverted back to their previous state.

Yikes, so is there any way to pick out the problem ones rather than checking each entry individually? Tags and notes can be easily noticed, but I am anxious about the actual pdfs (esp. highlights and comments). The "Accessed" column does not appear different between the original and copied collections.

adamsmith

there's nothing super easy but
1) If an item is in the group, it wouldn't really matter if you changed it or not, would it. You could just delete it in "My Library" and the copy it from the group.

2) To identify changed PDFs, an advanced search for "date modified --before---xyz
might help. Note that you'll have to select the group at the top of the search window and that you'll need to check the "include parent&child items" option when searching.

jah1147

Hmm, the "date modified" search didn't work for my purposes. What I might do is:
-copy everything over to my personal collection
-"delete collection and items"
-empty trash
-copy everything back over again

I would think the Groups versions would then copy correctly. However, I have to make sure the ones I am deleting aren't in any other collections or anything.... Ugh, well thanks for the help.