Avoid Duplication when dragging and dropping

carvalhar

Hi,

I'm a user linux of Zotero and when I drag & drop, Zotero doesn't check if it is a duplicate file before copying. How can i fix it?

I have thousands of pdfs and it's being painful to copy all them one by one...

dstillman

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean when you drag from outside Zotero?

You don't need to copy them one by one — you can drag as many files as you want, including a search for PDFs from your OS.

But I'm not sure what that has to do with deduplication. If you don't want duplicates, don't drag the same file more than once. There are reasons someone might want more than one copy of a file — e.g., to have one with annotations and one without — and Zotero doesn't try to prevent that.

carvalhar

The problem is that i had a research years before trying to use Zotero, so i have thousands of pdf. As i drag and drop sometimes i get error and when i tried a plugin to import the folder it crashed the app and now it's kind hard to add new pdf because i have to look and see if it isnt already there.

dstillman

There's no reason you should get an error dragging a file to Zotero. If you do, you should report that, with a Debug ID for it happening.

(Note that this isn't the same as Zotero not being able to retrieve metadata for a PDF. That's perfectly normal, and the new attachment would still remain in your library.)

You can always use the Duplicate Items function after you're done importing.