Migrated from Mendeley; keeping all my PDFs in the same place

Jaimoe · February 13, 2019

Hi all, I recently migrated my Mendeley library to Zotero (thanks to whoever provided the detailed migration documentation!).

Now I'm finding a new challenge: all of the 1000+ PDFs attached to items I migrated are currently living in a folder on my desktop. But new PDFs for items I added after the migration are being saved to subfolders of ~/Zotero/storage/ .

How do I batch move the PDFs in my desktop folder to the Zotero storage directory, and automatically the attachment links within the Zotero library?

Any guidance appreciated :)

Gurdas_Sandhu · February 13, 2019

The PDFs on your desktop, do they show-up as "link to file" versus "stored copy of file" for those in the storage folder? You could try Zotfile to fix this.
http://zotfile.com/

dstillman · February 13, 2019

@Jaimoe: The importer keeps files in the original folder and adds them as linked files, but we'll be adding a feature in the next release that lets you convert those to stored files instead so that they can be used with Zotero file syncing. (We'll also be adding an option to the importer to force files to be stored instead of linked.)

The ZotFile plugin can theoretically do this, but from other recent reports I believe that may not be working right now.

Jaimoe · February 13, 2019

Thank you @gurdas and @dstillman. I'll look into Zotfile for now. Where's the best place/way to monitor upcoming releases?

dstillman · February 14, 2019

I'll post here when this is available in a beta version.

dstillman · August 19, 2019

I've just pushed out a new Zotero beta that includes a new File → Manage Attachments → "Convert Linked Files to Stored Files…" feature.

If you want to help test this out, you should temporarily disable auto-sync and make a backup of your Zotero data directory (and, if you use the "Delete original files after storing" option, your PDF directory) before trying it, and then closely review the converted files before turning syncing back on. Let us know if you run into any problems.