Attachments do not appear on the online library

dotanhalevy
Hello,
One of my items contains a few hundred attachments when on the standalone on my computer, yet on the online library I see only some of the attachments. I have an unlimited storage account.

Any advice will be appreciated.

  • dstillman
    Start here: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/files_not_syncing
  • fcheslack
    Are you saying you have a few hundred attachments on a single item?
  • dotanhalevy
    Thank you dstillman, I could not find the answer there, because it does think properly. Now, when I search the main library (online) for the name of the attachment it points to the right item, but the specific attachment is not there. It seems as if there are more pages under this item hiding somewhere...
    fcheslack, indeed, this is an item under which I save photographs of documents.
  • andselisk
    edited June 9, 2017
    dotanhalevy
    What's the point of storing hundreds of photos under single entry? The context of this pile of pictures is not searchable, neither from your filesystem, nor from Zotero, as long as they are not OCRed. I usually merge scanned/captured docs into the single documents, the biggest one I have contains around 6K pages, has tons of pictures and rich-text paragraphs. Yep, the file size is huge, 600 MB, but I've never experienced any issues with opening, searching, or syncing (I use webdav to sync attachments though) this one. Do yourself a favor, convert them into *.pdf(s), extract text data with any optical recognition tool you have, and let Zotero index the created pdfs for you. Create entries in Zotero with logical content accordingly, and I'm pretty sure your life will become a little bit better:)
  • dotanhalevy
    That is a very good advice. Thank you. My problem is that in my case we are talking about archival folders (the item), which contains hundreds of documents, written in Ottoman Turkish. Each has its own characteristics in matter of date, content etc. As I am reviewing them (it takes time), I create separate item for each, but in the meantime, the rest have to stay in the mother folder. If I'll combine all to one pdf file, I would not be able to catalog them separately. What would you suggest?

    What brings me to my next question: how do I select and drag few attachments together, say for email attachment or to some folder on my computer. (in order to at least group some of the documents as pdf)
  • adamsmith
    I don't like telling people what to do in terms of organizing their Zotero (and I think the attachments not showing where you have a lot -- if that's indeed the fact -- would be a bug), but since you ask for suggestions: what I'd advise is not to attach the images to an item at all and just leave them in a collection as top level items while you properly classify them.
  • andselisk
    edited June 9, 2017
    dotanhalevy
    I see, my example deviates from what you need quite a bit. Well, what I usually do is I create a collection called "_Inbox", which does a good job staying on top of all collections' list (thanks to underscore char) and I usually put a dozen or so items I'm currently reviewing into this _Inbox collection (pretty much like any GTD app or eMail client would do). That's my Zotero's entry point for all file types I want to add to Zotero library.

    The bottom line here is that I don't add hundreds of "raw" files in Zotero as I see it pointless. As long as one hasn't reviewed them, they are not getting cited anywhere, so why bother feeding them to Zotero anyway? I have tons of stuff just resting in ~/Downloads folder awaiting to go to Zotero, and it's totally fine for me as long as I've not started reviewing these files yet.

    Regarding combining the pdfs, you are totally right. There is no point in merging unrelated files together. My example was an encyclopedia consisting of 11 volumes, but if you have a highly heterogeneous bunch of files, just keep them separated. I have tons of papers arranged in a way one pdf -- one entry, and it works out for me just fine. Just fill in the metadata thoroughly so that the stuff is actually "citeable".

    One more thing. I always keep the number of entries in _Inbox around 10, maybe 20, but not more. This way I can quicker handle items by drag'n'dropping them, tagging and adding metadata that Zotero translators fail to discover automatically. Once the item is appropriately labeled/processed, it gets deleted from here, so it stays within the main tree ("My Library"). I personally prefer tag system over merging stuff into collections, and I use temporarily created collections for the entries I'm going back to, or review for a manuscript, project etc.

    That's said, having a collection or folder with you items also simplifies export. If I need to send a bunch of files to anyone what I do is I create a temporary collection, drop the items there, then I export the collection in any format (I usually prefer BibLaTeX), making sure that "Export Files" option is activated. The output is a folder with a bunch of subfolders containing your files, each in separate folder. As a bonus you get a *.bib file -- if you write stuff with LaTeX, this comes in handy. Simple search/grep routine can help you fetch all *.pdf (in my case) or *.png, *.raw etc. files. I also heavily utilize ZotFile plugin primarily for consisting naming of the files. Your recipients will thank you if they receive files with the decent names.

    P. S. Regarding OCR, Ottoman Turkish might be most likely supported in FineReader and Google Drive app for scanning, though I'm not entirely sure about this.
Sign In or Register to comment.