Workflow question

Keith

I want to use Zotero to organize and catalogue a large number of academic articles in pdf form. Specifically, I want to: (1) create bibliographical entries for the articles by extracting metadata, and (2) link the pdfs to the entries, but store them in a folder on my OneDrive, *not* in Zotero's internal storage (i.e. I want them to be linked not attached).
After some experimentation, I have discovered that the following workflow seems to do what I want:
1) Move each pdf into Zotero and let the program create an entry for it. This achieves (1) but moves the pdf to Zotero's internal storage, which I don't want.
2) Use Zotfile's 'rename and move attachment' command to move the attached file to the location on my OneDrive.
My question is whether this is a sound workflow or whether it has hidden drawbacks. In particular, I see that it leaves behind a randomly named folder for each pdf in Zotero's internal storage, containing files named .zotero-ft-cache and .zotero-ft-info.
Are these folders simply relics of step (1) where I imported the pdfs to Zotero's internal storage? And if so, can I safely delete them without affecting the bibliographic entries and links that I want to keep?
Finally, is there a simpler way of achieving what I want to do?
I'd be very grateful for any advice you may have!

adamsmith

There's no particular problem with the workflow, no, though I don't think you really need Zotfile: You can just start with the PDFs in your OneDrive folder and add them as links to Zotero -- Zotero will still be able to retrieve metadata and you don't need to manually trigger ZotFile's rename.

You can either use the "Link to File" option under the green + sign or drag with modifier keys (Ctrl+Shift (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Option (Mac)) to do that.

The empty folder handles the indexing for Zotero, so you want to keep that in place and it doesn't do any harm.

Keith

Thank you for your reply, which is very helpful. I like to use ZotFile because it allows more flexible renaming and will rename and move my pdfs with one click. But I see now that I should be linking in step 1. That is, I should be using Ctrl+Shift while dragging at step 1. That seems to do just what I want.