Easy way to search for/clean up duplicate attachments?

SIWA_Andrew

Hi all,

I have been running a Zotero database for quite a while, and have been merging the duplicates as they occur. The problem is that this creates duplicates of the attachments when the items get merged. I know from reading other discussions that this is a known issue and a fix is coming eventually. I know how to prevent this going forward, so that isn't my question.

My question is, does anyone know of a way to search for all references that have multiple attachments so that I can clean up the mess I made of the duplicates that are already present? I seem to remember that I figured out how to do it once before, but I can't remember how I did it.

It may be that the answer is that I have to go through and manually clean them up, but before I resign myself to that unpleasant task, I figured I would ask if anyone else has come up with anything.

Thanks in advance!

dstillman

You can just click an item in the items list and press + to expand all items, and then scroll through the list. Not sure what you'd be looking for beyond that. You could use an external tool to search for duplicate files within the 'storage' folder in your Zotero data directory, paste the 8-character folder name into the search bar in All Fields & Tags mode to find the attachment in question, and delete them that way, but I doubt that would be faster than just scrolling through the list. (It also would find files that exist in more than one library, and it wouldn't find any files that haven't been downloaded if you're using "download as needed" file-sync mode.)

Recent versions of Zotero will automatically remove duplicate PDFs — exact file matches or clearly equivalent content matches — when merging parent items.