Updating Resulted in Irreversible Renaming of my Library (700 files)

cogmind
I updated Zotero today. Previous settings were not transfered and without any prior warning, all my files were automatically renamed.

I have tried to rename attached files using the right-click menu but the file names do not change. I have also tried using the ZotFile add-on to rename files back to my own pattern, but to no avail.

Please advice
/Cogmind
  • dstillman
    It's not totally clear to me what you mean here, but this doesn't sound like something Zotero does. Unless there's something I'm not thinking of, Zotero only renames newly added files or files for which you choose "Rename File from Parent Metadata", so what you describe wouldn't be possible with stock Zotero.

    What version were you running before you updated? Was this just a minor update, or were you coming from Zotero 4?

    Are you referring to stored files or linked files?

    Did you have ZotFile installed when this happened? (I don't think ZotFile does any automatic renaming either, though.)
  • cogmind
    It is a functionality of Zotero. Please refer to the fourth check box in the Preferences dialogue: "Automatically rename attachment files using parent metadata".

    This happened during a minor update from 5.0.54 to 5.0.68. There was supposedly a fix according to the changelog in version 5.0.56 (https://www.zotero.org/support/changelog), but either the bug was reintroduced or it was never patched:

    "When metadata was successfully retrieved for a linked PDF, the file was renamed regardless of the “Rename linked files” preference introduced in 5.0.61"


    (I only installed Zotfile after the observation and I am refering to attached files.)
  • cogmind
    Sorry, I just noticed it is a related issue, but not the same - renaming by default and settings not carrying over from previous version.
  • cogmind
    My apologies again. We recently had a system update where Acrobat Reader was uninstalled on all computers. On my Windows system, PDFs are no longer associated with a PDF reader, but with Firefox and thus have the same file type as HTML-files. Could it be that Zotero re-rendered the files because of this?
  • cogmind
    I didn't realize there were two renaming functions. "Rename File from Parent Metadata" did not resolve my problem. Although I'm not sure what file refers to in this case, I realized that the solution below works (perfectly with custom ZotFile format):


    SOLUTION
    Manage Attachments: Rename attachments

  • dstillman
    edited June 24, 2019
    It is a functionality of Zotero. Please refer to the fourth check box in the Preferences dialogue: "Automatically rename attachment files using parent metadata".
    That's what I'm saying, though — that functionality has nothing to do with renaming of existing files, only new files, and that includes the change in 5.0.65. You're referring to automatic renaming of existing files, which isn't something that Zotero currently does. (A future version might, as an option.)
    On my Windows system, PDFs are no longer associated with a PDF reader, but with Firefox and thus have the same file type as HTML-files. Could it be that Zotero re-rendered the files because of this?
    No. There's no code to do this.

    If you just mean that new files started to be renamed after you upgraded — perhaps you only checked new files, or looked at attachment titles in Zotero rather than the filenames for older files — then yes, that could happen if your settings were somehow reset. That wouldn't happen during a normal upgrade, so something would've had to have happened to the preference file.
    I didn't realize there were two renaming functions.
    One is from Zotero and the other is from ZotFile.
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