Remove files from search? Any alternative to multiple profiles?

xxtraloud

I have been using Zotero for many years now and my library has grown to a considerable size. I know Zotero doesn't support multiple library and you can use profiles or groups, but neither is really a practical solution.

Is seems trivial from a software engineering POV to offer a way to have items that are not included in the search/indexing, especially to improve performance with very large libraries. The only way I can think is to have a collection with the items I use and one with the items I don't use. In that sense I would never use the main library, and just create subcollections of the "active" main collection. It's still somewhat limiting and frankly I don't understand this choice to force users to use these workaround solutions.

So my questions are:
1) can items be excluded from the search/indexing?
2) what is the logical reason for not wanting to improve the performance of zotero by having multiple libraries?

Thank you

adamsmith

1) No (not at all a common request, btw.) and while technically probably not super hard, it does create all sorts of overhead (there needs to be a switch in the GUI, that info needs to get stored, it needs to get synced (or not), etc.). Not seeing this one happening.

2) Zotero does have multiple libraries via groups. You just don't like the implementation. The reason for not duplicating that functionality should be obvious -- duplicating existing functionality creates additional development and maintenance costs and is a frequent source of user confusion -- but if you say what about groups doesn't work for your purposes, there may be improvements in stock

xxtraloud

1) yes I expected that it wouldn't be a common request. Then what is your solution to optimize very large libraries?

2) Groups forces me to go online to manage/edit/create, that's not such a big deal. But I can't use a webdav, it forces me to use Zotero online storage, is that correct?

bwiernik

2) yes, for technical reasons, groups do not work with WebDAV

adamsmith

1) Zotero has gotten much better for large libraries, I think up to about 50k items now performs quite well. Beyond that, groups or multiple profiles are the way to go.

xxtraloud

In that case the limitation of using the Zotero online storage is the biggest drawback. What is the size limit of group libraries?

You have mentioned maintenance costs, then why don't you offer the possibility of linking groups to external hosting solutions? Wouldn't that reduce your costs?

adamsmith

There is no theoretical size limit on group libraries - their performance is about identical to individual libraries.

For maintenance, I was talking about code maintenance -- every additional option/feature has to be tested and maintained as Zotero releases new versions. Connecting groups to external hosting also just isn't trivial, if you think about the permissions issues involved (how would Zotero align permissions on an external server to group permissions?)