moving items between collections

fabiocampanile
When I drag an item from one collection to a subcollectio it gets copied to it. If I want to move it I have to manually cancel it after the copy. Is there a way to move directly?
  • adamsmith
    hold the shift key while dragging (cmd on mac)
  • fabiocampanile
    great! thank you. I had tried ctrl and did not work.
  • kirk86
    @adamsmith This only works if you directly pick an item from a collection/subcollection and move it to another one via the shift key but if you go to My Library and search for an item from the "All fields & tags bar" and then move it using the shift key to another collection from where it was originally, it will still copy it and not move it.
  • dstillman
    edited August 7, 2019
    That's a misunderstanding. The library root always contains all items, so moving items out of there isn't something that would ever be possible.

    https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#the_zotero_collections_model

    When you use the search bar, you're simply filtering the view that you're in. So if you're in My Library, you're seeing what's in the library root, and that's always going to be all items.

    You can, however, search for an item in the library root, locate the item in a collection, and then move it from that collection to another collection with Shift-drag/Cmd-drag.
  • kirk86
    @dstillermann Thanks for the clarification but that's really a lot of steps for an easy task, wouldn't it be easier to just search for the item from library root and directly move it from there, I suppose that library root knows where the item is located in which collection since pressing Alt gives you that location, so why do we have to do all that cause it gets quite tedious if you have many collections and you're trying to re-arrange lots of items.
  • dstillman
    edited August 7, 2019
    What you're suggesting just doesn't make conceptual sense. You can't move something out of a view that it can't be moved out of.

    There's no reason to do moving from the library root. Do it from Unfiled Items (in which case you can just drag to a collection, and the item will disappear from the view) or do it from a collection where you don't actually want the item to exist.
  • dstillman
    And bear in mind that the whole point of collections is that you can have items in multiple collections. They're not like filesystem folders where you'd be duplicating files and taking up space. Unless you don't actually want an item to exist in a given collection anymore, there's no reason to touch it there — you can just drag the item from the library root to any other collections where it would be appropriate.
  • kirk86
    @dstillman I get your arguments but I think you might have misunderstood my point.

    "There's no reason to do moving from the library root"

    If I have multiple collections and thousands of pdfs chances are that I won't remember in which collection I have putted X but since I remember the title of X or partially remember it I can search from the root in order to make sure that the search propagates in all collections. Once I've found X now I want to move it to another collection, the only way to do it is to actually press Alt find in which collection it was initially then move to that collection, locate X again and now move to the new collection by pressing Shift & drag. Now if that seems like a rational number of operations just to move an item from one collection to another without duplicating it then I don't have any words.
  • dstillman
    edited August 7, 2019
    I understand, but you're sort of fighting against the normal usage pattern of Zotero, where you add an item to a collection if it's relevant to that collection, and the fact that it exists in another isn't particularly relevant. If you insist that an item only ever exist in one collection, you can do that, but things may be a bit more complicated to manage.

    (The ability to move items between collections didn't even exist for the first 7 years of Zotero's existence. It's useful if, say, you're splitting a collection up into more specific subcollections, so you can just Shift-drag items out of the parent, but it's not meant to be the primary way of using Zotero collections.)

    There will likely be other ways to manage item collection membership in future versions, but this just isn't something that comes up the way most people use Zotero. And conceptually, "moving" from the library root wouldn't be the way we'd address it — it'd likely be by something closer to how you manage tags, by unchecking/removing selected collections.

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