Control over Zotero library location and naming

jhhanson

It would be nice if Zotero's library (attachments, etc.) weren't stuck way back in the App. Support on Mac OS X and we were able to manually target it to a specific folder.

Also, to get around the file-naming problem for sites that name attachments generically, would it not be advantageous to organize the library folders by date, partial name of site, etc. instead of the random numbers assigned by Zotero's file organizer? Searching a library through the Finder when everything is named "3427" "11382" etc. is impossible.

dstillman

Support for specifying a custom location for the data directory has already been added on the development branch.

Explanation for the "random" numbers is here: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/451/ Even using date and partial name of site, we couldn't really guarantee uniqueness of the folder. I suppose we could use the item id as a prefix for the folder and also include the partial name, though, if browsing snapshots via the OS was important to people...

It sounds like your concerns would be largely addressed just with better file naming, though, regardless of the names of the folders. There've been a number of requests to have PDFs and other files be saved according to the title, author, etc., ideally in a customizable manner, and we'll likely implement such a feature soon, since 0.pdf is obviously not very useful.

In the meantime, you can easily rename attached files by checking "Rename Associated File" in the attachment renaming dialog box (accessed by clicking on the attachment title in the metadata pane).

vav

What I do is take a snapshot of the file and move it under the named link. So it becomes part of the library and not an attachment. I could not find a way to edit the name of a file that's part of the library.