Turn off Snapshot

st

Hello,

i have a very important thing for me and i think for others: There should be an option to turn of snapshots for reference imports. For example when i import references from pubmed i don't need snapshots, so they use useless disk space, but more important: They disturb my database. Because on the site are a lot of informations not belonging to the article i imported and when i search then my database zotero finds the information in the snapshot. This happens very often for me so i delete the snapshot every time by hand.
Can't you make an option for this?

Thanks
Stolzi

dstillman

Well, in the case of PubMed, a better question is whether it should save snapshots to begin with. Do any PubMed pages actually have useful data on them that's not saved by Zotero's PubMed translator?

st

No, i didn't find some.

amacom73

The only thing that appears in some pubmed results that doesn't get added is the PMC ID or, in the case of the "abstract plus" view, the related results pane . But I can't think of a situation in which I'd want Pubmed snapshots cluttering up my library given that the URL which gets me to all that stuff is in the library entry.

st

At all i think that in most situations people don't need snapshots from pubmed. And if a situation appears where you need it, it's easy to add it by hand.

Shouldn't snaphots disabled in general for imports for sites where an import filter exists? I think that people need in general only the citation stuff? I think it makes much more problems because on most sites are informations which don't belong to the article. This disrupts extremely the search results...

noksagt

Shouldn't snaphots disabled in general for imports for sites where an import filter exists?

No. Because snapshots are wanted when they are the article's full text. If you don't like even these snapshots, disable them by unchecking gear icon->preferences:general:miscellaneous:automatically take snapshots...

dstillman

I've updated the PubMed translator to not save snapshots. Your copy of Zotero should auto-update within 24 hours, or you can update manually by clicking Update Now in the General pane of the Zotero prefs.

freeze

Please do not do this.
It is easy to turn off default snapshots if you want.
I find the Pubmed snapshots useful:
1: It is much quicker to use Zotero plus the snapshot if I want later to download a pdf through my library links. (Quicker than using Pubmed again to find the reference)
2: Ditto if I want to look at any similar papers suggested by Pubmed

Now that I think about it, perhaps the URL is enough. It is not so difficult to copy and paste it. So disregard the above.
Can I search for (only) Pubmed snapshots and delete them?

dstillman

Impressive turnabout.

It is not so difficult to copy and paste it. So disregard the above.

If there's no snapshot, double-clicking the item in the middle pane or clicking the View button in the right pane should take you to the URL in the URL field. You can also click the "URL" label to the left of the field in the right pane.

Can I search for (only) Pubmed snapshots and delete them?

"pubmed snapshot" (with quotes) in quick search bar. Enter. Click an item in the middle pane. Press Ctrl-A or Cmd-A to select all matches. Delete or backspace to delete.

st

Cool, thank you! (Now i can try it because zotero runs again ;-) ) And also thanks for the last tip with deleting all pubmed snapshots. But i had to use: "PubMed Snapshot"

freeze

I hate to be a pest here, but you have successfully solved my previous issues.
I deleted all "pubmed snapshots" from my library. This was successful in that they no longer show up in searches I make. Which is good.
However, the Zotero Storage folder did not get as much smaller as I thought it would, and in fact many of the files in there still seem to be PubMed snapshot stuff. This is not good, because it makes copying or synching the Zotero folder take much longer than it should have to.
Am I missing something here?

mc

You may need to empty your Trash folder.

freeze

No, its the zotero Storage folder that has all the undeleted fies (many thousands of them).
I use Windows 98, so I have no idea what a Trash folder might do in this situation.

noksagt

In Zotero, under 'My Library' is 'Trash'. Right-click on this & select 'Empty Trash'.

freeze

I must be missing something here.
When I run Zotero, at the top of the left pane is "Collections". Under that rubric is "MyLibrary" and several subcollections I have created. However, there is no collection called "Trash".
In my Firefox profile folder is the folder Zotero, and in that are files including the sqlite files. The only folder is "Storage", which contains many numbered folders (hundreds of which, for some reason, still contain PubMed snapshot stuff).
I have run a search of my hard drive, and there is no folder named "Trash".

What am I not seeing?

dstillman

You're running 1.0. The trash is only in 2.0.

There might have been bugs in 1.0 that prevented files associated with deleted attachments from being removed from the 'storage' folder. The upgrade to 2.0 will move these to an 'orphaned-files' directory at the top of the Zotero data directory.

freeze

Because everything is working so well (aside from this issue), I had been avoiding updating. Because of the "if this scares you even a tiny bit " warning.
So, two questions:
1: Is there any downside to updating to 2.0?
2: If I do not want to upgrade, is there a manual search I can do to delete the orphaned files?

dstillman

If you're not comfortable upgrading now, just wait for 2.0 Final, which should be out pretty soon. Disk space is cheap, and dealing with it in any other way isn't worth the effort.

freeze

Ok
Thanks

mostrander

Hello,

I found this discussion when I was trying to figure out why items that I am saving from PubMed no longer appear to have a snapshot associated with them. Has this feature been turned off in the PubMed translator?

I hope not, as I find this feature VERY helpful. I find the abstract is difficult to read in the Zotero third pane window. I also liked to use the highlight and sticky note feature on my saved snapshots to remind myself about important items in the article.

Please let me know if the automatic snapshots in PubMed still work.

Thanks!

adamsmith

Has this feature been turned off in the PubMed translator?

yes. It's a constant dilemma whether to include these or not - the argument presented against inclusion was that it messes up search results, which seems plausible to me.
obviously you can still manually add the snapshot.

mostrander

Oh, that's such a bummer! I REALLY liked this feature. It saved so much time when I am automatically saving dozens or up to a hundred items from PubMed. Then to have to manually add the snapshot for each one? Seems like it is much easier to disable the automatic save than to have to manually take the snapshot every time I have an item. I am trying to convince people at my company to switch from EndNote to Zotero and this was something a lot of users were very enthusiastic about.

So, I've taken the manual snapshot, but am having trouble trying to link it to the reference in my library. It seems to now a stand-alone item. I can't drag it to the reference and have it be "linked" or "associated" with it. Suggestions?

One last thing...thanks for all the hard work and effort. Zotero is really great.

adamsmith

the argument was that there is no additional info in the snapshot - see discussion above.

The way to manually add the snapshot is to right-click on the item and select "add attachment" --> "add snapshot of current page"

mostrander

thanks for your help. I see how to do that now.

delenca

Dan Stillman said:
"If there's no snapshot, double-clicking the item in the middle pane or clicking the View button in the right pane should take you to the URL in the URL field. You can also click the "URL" label to the left of the field in the right pane."

But this does not work if you have a pdf attached to the Item. Double-clicking the middle pane item or the "View Snapshop" button takes you to the PDF rather than to the http link.

Also, it is possible to have this behavior as a toggle?

Thanks,
-Alex

dstillman

Right, if there's a snapshot you currently have to click the URL label. We've talked about having the double-click/View behavior be configurable between the URL and the snapshot—it's a possibility.

delenca

Right, if there's a snapshot you currently have to click the URL label. We've talked about having the double-click/View behavior be configurable between the URL and the snapshot—it's a possibility.

Ah, ok, I didn't realize I could just click on URL label - I was copy & pasting. But it's still a little non-intuitive (at least to me), and requires that I scroll down the list no the right. I kind of expect one of the buttons on the right panel or a right-click on the item itself to take me to the original URL. Either way, I do have to agree with the premise of no longer creating the separate item as it redundant and complicates the search. So I suppose my suggestion would be that method to access that URL should be made a little more intuitive/clear/obvious (i.e. not requiring a visit to the forum). THanks!
-Alex

Merakor

if you work with chrome you need to also turn off the snapshot option inside the extension.

aurimas

There is no Snapshot option in the Chrome extension. I doubt that any Snapshot issue you're experiencing at this point is related to the above discussion. Please start a new thread for further questions/issue reports.

adamsmith

There is no Snapshot option in the Chrome extension.

Yes there is--for the save to server option. Obviously that doesn't affect what happens with items saved to Standalone.

aurimas

ooops. I don't think I've ever authorize the connector with server. The options only show up once authorized (though I thought that those options should exist)