Merging items - all tags kept?

dbrear

Sorry if I've asked this before - when I merge duplicate items, does Zotero keep the 'un-duplicated' tags from the deleted item?

adamsmith

yes

krehbiel

Thanks. A follow-up. During a merge is it the case that all attachments from the duplicate(s) will form a union, too, like the tags? In other words the merge pretty much combines all info you have entered and only if there's an inconsistency does it matter which entry you have given precedence to? Is there anything to worry about?

adamsmith

Right, so the attached files actually duplicate (so if each item has an attachment you're left with two), even if they're exactly the same. That's not ideal, but hard to avoid if we want to prevent e.g. an annotated copy of a file to be removed.

The only thing that gets overwritten are actual metadata fields, i.e. what you see in the "Info" pane, even if there are no conflicts. One item is treated as the "master" item (you can pick which at the top right during merge) and those metadata fields are then preferred by default, even if they're empty. You can individually pick the ones from the other item(s) during merge.