Move from unfiled into multiple collections at once?

brownitus
Currently I move items from unfiled to a collection, and then click into that collection and move it into another collection if I want to have it in multiple collections. Is there a way to place an item from unfiled into 2 or more collections at once?
  • adamsmith
    No, simultaneous moving into multiple collections (from anywhere) isn't currently possible. I'm not sure if there are plans to allow this -- there are some conceptual difficulties with having multiple collections at once selected, but I seem to recall that @dstillman was open to adding this.
  • brownitus
    Thank you for the confirmation! This would be an amazing feature as having a single item in multiple places is one of my favorite things about Zotero.
  • dstillman
    I'm not sure there's really a good way to do that in the UI. But, of course, this is really only an issue if you try to do it from Unfiled Items, since the item disappears once it's filed. If you do it from any other view, you can just drag to successive collections from the same place. So one option would be to just sort your library by Date Added and do the filing from there. You could also drag all items in Unfiled to a temporary collection, or add a temporary tag, and then file them from the appropriate other view, and then remove all items from that collection/tag when done.

    One thing that could be useful here is the ability to automatically assign one or more tags to new items, which we've considered adding. That would help people who want a "to read" tag, and it could also help for this by allowing you to have a "to file" tag that you could remove once you'd fully filed an item.
  • brownitus
    That is what I am currently doing, the sort by Date Added, then when I move it to CollectionA, I click on CollectionA, find the item and drag it to any other collections I also want it in.

    The temporary idea is quite good. I just made a To Sort collection and will save everything to there. I like the idea of dragging items from there to any appropriate collections and then just bulk removing everything from that collection, a lot snappier.
  • dstillman
    That is what I am currently doing, the sort by Date Added, then when I move it to CollectionA, I click on CollectionA, find the item and drag it to any other collections I also want it in.
    No, I'm saying you can just do this from the library root, not Unfiled. Then there's no need to switch to CollectionA.
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