Files organization on Hard drive

mindstyle
Hello folks,

I am currently Mendeley user with a library of about 2GB of pdfs. These papers are very well organized in respective folders in Mendeley but on hard drive, all are in one folder only.

So when I try to read the paper on iPad (without Mendeley app, but in Good Reader), its a nightmare to find the paper in LOOOONG list of pdfs.
Even after repeated requests from the users, Mendeley developers have conveniently ignored the request and now I have reached to the end of my tolerance rope. Would love to get out of Mendeley.

With the significant time investment in the process (as I can not export the pdfs along with the citations), I wonder if Zotero organizes pdfs same as on the hard drive as that of inside Zotero. I will be making 6 main folders for 6 projects and then various subfolders under each of these Main folders. In ideal world, I would like to see the same directory structure on the hard drive (which is synced with Dropbox and I can read on iPad)

Papers1 did that well but as I moved away from Mac, I had to find an alternative. With latest mutants of Papers application, I do not dare to use it.

Thanks a lot in advance for all comments.
  • adamsmith
    The short version is that it's basically impossible to have your collection structure in Zotero mirrored in file organization.

    You can use Zotfile to create other organizational structures -- e.g. by year, author, journal -- but since sollections are not like folders, but more like playlists, i.e. one item can be contained in multiple collections, there is no good way to do that.
  • aurimas
    But in general, there is little reason to ever have PDFs organized this way anyway. For reading on iPad, you have ZotPad and Papership apps that let you access your pdfs in the same structure that Zotero does. If you do want to use dropbox for syncing between tablet abd computer, you have ZotFilw, which will place copies of PDFs into structured folders (as adamsmith mentions above).

    Additionally, Zotero doesn't store PDF admissions outside of the pdf, so you can access the annotations from any PDF reader.

    I'd say give Zotero a try with a small library and post here if you find something that doesn't work for your workflow. There's probably a convenient solution out there
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