Upgrade StorageRevert automatic renaming?
Hi all. Out of frustration with Mendeley, I recently (= today) started using Zotero. I thought the software to be a worthy alternative to what Mendeley once was, until I realised all of my PDF file names (thousands of them) have been renamed automatically without my consent.
I don't know who in their right minds would even consider implementing such an asinine feature, let alone enabling it by default, but obviously the damage has already been done. Does Zotero by any chance store the original file names, so that my carefully organised file system could be restored?
I don't know who in their right minds would even consider implementing such an asinine feature, let alone enabling it by default, but obviously the damage has already been done. Does Zotero by any chance store the original file names, so that my carefully organised file system could be restored?
Is it possible you're looking at the filenames of the stored files rather than the original folder of PDFs that you used with Mendeley?
In my old naming system, I would sometimes add keywords to highlight certain aspects (like "[review]" or "[supplement]"), which would help me find key publications. In the Zotero naming scheme, all of this information is lost. Is there any way of reverting the name changes?
If you did do the latter, though, what version of Zotero was this with? In Zotero 5.0.60, and for a year prior, linking to a file would rename it based on the parent metadata. In 5.0.61, which came out on March 9th, we added a separate "Rename linked files" setting in the General pane of the preferences, defaulting to off. So if you just downloaded Zotero, which is up to 5.0.64, that should've been off, and linking to files shouldn't have changed their filenames. But if you had an outdated version, you might have gotten the previous renaming behavior.
In any case, I'm afraid there's no way to revert the renaming done by Zotero, so you'd need to restore from a backup of those files (external hard drive, Dropbox file history, etc.).
For what it's worth, if you do continue using Zotero, the standard approach for things like "review" or "supplement" would be to use tags in Zotero itself. Most people do rely on automatic renaming, often with the third-party ZotFile plugin, which offers sophisticated customizable renaming rules. (For linked files, I believe ZotFile does the renaming semiautomatically, so you'd have the option of transferring any extra metadata from the filenames into tags before renaming the files based on the parent metadata.)
Sorry for the hassle. Again, though, bear in mind that that's really not the way you'd want to migrate to Zotero, so if you want to continue, and you're able to recover from a backup of your files and/or want to start again, you should close Zotero, delete your Zotero data directory, do a Restore to Online Library from the Sync → Reset pane of the Zotero preferences to clear your online library, and then follow the recommended import steps.
Does Zotero offer any possibility of "watching" a directory for new PDFs? Or otherwise scan a directory and only import items that are not already present in the library? This is a strong feature in Mendeley, but I haven't found an equivalent feature in Zotero. Sometimes I download 20+ articles per day, and adding those individually each time would be a real pain and a recipe for disaster (I will likely forget half the articles I retrieved).
If you want to keep your files organized in an external directory, ZotFile can automatically move downloaded files there as linked files, using a renaming scheme that you choose.
If you haven't yet, I'd strongly recommend reading through Adding Items to Zotero to get a better sense of how this is all designed to work.