Export photograph files (image files), how to export subset

samdiener
Hello,

I'd like to export all the photos I've collected (from Flickr say) for a particular collection. They will all be tagged "photo" and also usually share an issue tag, such as 200904.

I don't want to export a bibliography of these items. I want to export this subset of the files themselves so I can easily look through them and choose the best ones. There might be an easy way to do this, but I haven't found it.

Also, even putting the subset issue aside, I haven't yet found a description of the meaning of the different export formats (RDF, etc.), or which ones to choose for which purpose.

Zotero is great for collecting the images, but not designed to scan through a bunch of images at once.

Any suggestions for how to do this?

P.S. I've just ugraded to 1.5 beta and did my first sync and it worked beautifully. I have more computers to sync, but I want to test it out with two first. In any case, I'm grateful for all your work. Thanks!
  • dstillman
    You didn't say what platform you're on, but if you're using a Mac you can just select the items you want (or use the tag selector, quick search, or a saved search and then Select All) and then drag the files to the Finder. Having other items selected isn't a problem.

    Multi-file drag-and-drop no longer works on Windows, unfortunately.
  • samdiener
    Hi Dan,

    I read your response with much excitement, since I mostly use Macs (and occasionally, Windo$e). I use mac os 10.5.6 (Leopard) on one machine, and just tested your method. Unfortunately, whether I had one item selected or multiple items (by clicking on them in the central column), when I dragged them into a folder on the desktop, I didn't get the images, I got files of the kind "text clipping." The clippings contained the bibliographic citations for the item or items selected.

    I hope I'm just doing something wrong.

    I also have other machines with mac os 10.4.x, which I could try this method on tomorrow, in case it's a mac os version issue.

    Thanks,
    Sam
  • dstillman
    You need to drag the attachments, not the parent items.
  • samdiener
    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for staying with me on this one. That's useful to know. There's a few scenarios.

    1) If on Flickr I click the icon in the address bar to add the item to Zotero, and then drag it out, I get the text clipping. There is no attached item, it's just a singleton item.

    2) If I create new item from current page on a Flickr page, then drag the attachment out, or if I click the Take Snapshot of Current Page, and drag that item out, it creates a folder, inside of which is the jpg of interest among other items which made up the html page. This is fine for one item, but if I export a whole lot of items at once, I'd have to extract the jpgs from each folder. Not ideal.

    3) If I open the url for an image, say, http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/images/afghan/pic_email.gif, and click the Create New Item icon, it does load the gif as an attachment, which I can drag out and place it on the finder as a gif. This raises an interesting question about what to tag. In general, I've been tagging the item which encloses the attachment, not the attachment itself. But in this case, I'd do better to tag the attachment, so that when I search for that tag, I don't have to one by click the arrow to expose the attachment within the item.

    4) Given that, just to return to Flickr (can you tell it's the primary way I find photos?), it is sometimes possible, if the photographer has posted multiple sizes, to click on all sizes, and then ctrl-click to view the image in a separate page, a la, http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3639/3322487385_9c251420c7_b.jpg. Then, if I take a Zotero snapshot of that page, I can drag the resulting item directly to the finder and it's a jpg. Not a horrible method perhaps, but it loses a lot of the Zotero functionality of clicking the zotero icon (as in point 1 in this post) in which Zotero automatically grabs all the valuable metadata (creator, date, flickr tags, etc.)

    The reason I'm going on about this is that Zotero is very close to being an excellent image harvester (one capable of downloading both an image in an accessible form and its associated metadata), but these usability issues block it from being fully useful for me, and I suspect, others.

    In Peace,
    Sam
  • dstillman
    Turn on "Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items" in the Zotero preferences (under the gear menu) and saving via the address bar icon will also save the photo as an attachment, which you can drag out directly.

    You can also drag images from web pages on top of regular items in Zotero to create child attachments (though it looks like 1.5b1 doesn't automatically refresh the list of child attachments if the parent item is already expanded).
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