Automatic searching items-pdf

cesare.beccaria

Hi, Zotero's community.
The fact. My Zotero items were linked with PDF attachments located in many external folders. I have had to eliminate duplicate and collect all PDFs in one folder, synchronized with Google drive. But now, many items of Zotero can't find their PDF linked attachments.
1. Is it possible for Zotero items to search their attachments automatically in my new folder?
2. If not, do you know a way to avoid my 11GB PDFs to be linked manually?
Thank you,
Alessandro

bwiernik

When you move or delete files outside of Zotero, Zotero has no way of following them to the new locations, as you’ve noticed. As a first step, the easiest thing to do would be to undo all of the moves and put the items back in their original locations. (See below if that’s not possible.)

It is generally much easier either store all of your PDFs in Zotero (and let it manage where they are stored on your computer) or, if Google Drive is necessary, to use the Zotfile plugin to manage their locations. With Zotfile, use its Rename Attachmnents function to move all of your PDFs to one folder in Google Drive.

If you can’t put thre PDFs back to their original locations, you can either try to open them one by one in Zotero then navigate to their new locations to fix the link or use the Zutilo plugin to batch edit the links for many items at once.