Adding my own pdf file collection to Zotero

thharter · May 7, 2013

I have a about dozen directories, each with dozens of subdirectories containing pdf files of journal articles that I have collected over the years. The directories effectively reflect a crude categorization of the articles by topics and subtopics. I would like to bring all of these PDFs into Zotero and use effectively a similiar structure in the Zotero library (using collections or tags or both). I am new to Zotero. Is there a - relatively simple, automated - way to this? I don't want to add these files one at a time (there are thousands).

adamsmith · May 7, 2013

Not really. You can re-create your folder structure in Zotero (be it as tags or as collections) and then select all items in any given subfolder and drag them to the corresponding collection in Zotero (and then probably run retrieve metadata on them: http://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata ).
By your description of your set-up that involves creating about 150 collections and 150 import steps, but that's the best I can think of.

(You can _import_ the pdfs all at once by creating a saved search/virtual folder for them in your OS, but then you'd have to manually re-sort them in Zotero.)

thharter · May 8, 2013

Thanks for the feedback. I will try that. A friend of mine sent me an email with this comment, and from there, I figure I would have to distribute them through the collections/tags:

"With that said, you don't have to add each pdf individually. You can do a search for your pdf's, and then add them to zotero. Basically, just search in the highest level directory of your pdf library by file type ( e.g., .pdf), and make sure to enable searching in subfolders (if not automatically enabled). The search will return all your pdfs in the folder that you indicated as well as its subfolders. "

adamsmith · May 8, 2013

yes, what your friend says is the same idea I have at the end in parentheses. Problem is that you then have to replicate your collection structure and figure out which PDFs go where - I figured that might be easier to do right on import rather than with all PDFs in your library, but that's entirely up to you..