Save PDF to Web Library only even when app is open

sjjohnson23

Super sorry in advance if I missed a post with this exact problem & solution.

I'm hoping to have the app open so I can do citations in Word in real time, but I don't want the PDFs to download to my computer, just to the Web Library.

Ideal:
1. Have Word doc open
2. Have web library and desktop app open simultaneously
3. Find Article
4. Click Zotero button from browser extension
* Web Library gets all info including PDF
* App only gets citation info, not PDF
5. Cite directly in Word doc

Thanks in advance!

adamsmith

I don't want the PDFs to download to my computer, just to the Web Library.

Sorry, that can't be done. You can disable PDF downloads entirely, but you can't, with any reasonable workflow*, have PDFs only on the server.

*In theory you could turn off Zotero while browsing and authorize saving to the server, set up sync to only download PDFs as needed, and then open Zotero once you want to cite but
a) saving to the web works a good bit less well, especially in terms of downloading PDFs, than saving locally and
b) Zotero has a relatively long loading time because its intended to essentially run all the time, so quitting and restarting this is not going to be a good experience.

Is the main concern local storage space? You can, just regularly delete to contents of the "storage" folder in the Zotero data directory -- the files will remain on the server.https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
Zotero devs have mentioned plans to allow some sort of automation for this, but I don't think there's an ETA or even details on how exactly that's going to work.

dstillman

Zotero devs have mentioned plans to allow some sort of automation for this, but I don't think there's an ETA or even details on how exactly that's going to work.

You'll be able to configure per-library how many days to keep local copies of files that have been uploaded to the server. Work on this feature is mostly done, so should be available fairly soon.