how automatically create new linked items from an existing folder of video files

I want to "Import" links only from a folder that has video files. There are a lot of files so I don't want to manually create each items and then link the video. After the items are created I will edit each entry to add the appropriate meta data.
  • You can click the New Item button and select "Link to File…", and then select all files in the folder. You can then select them all in Zotero, right-click, and choose Create Parent Items.

    That's really not a great workflow, though, since you would be manually entering metadata for lots of items. Does metadata for these videos exist anywhere (e.g., on the web), or are these original materials?
  • these are all original items in the files.

    The work flow I imagined was to link all the many files in our archive to one item each and then turn a group loose - in an organized fashion - to annotate each item with metadata so we can associate the files/items (audio and video) as appropriate with the metadata. I was hoping to avoid having to eyeball each item before they got the initial entry into Zotero. Does this make sense? or is there a better approach.

    Please note that we have several thousand videos in the archive spread across hundreds of folders. The idea was to load them up in a batch process. The archive is for all intents static with a fixed not wholly organized hierarchical structure. There are several exact copies of the archive distributed across a wide geography. Therefore we are going to use links, private groups, mapped base drives, and database sync to spread the workload of attaching the correct metadata to each file.

    Also we are new to Zotero.

    If the db schema is published and not overly complex I have experience with sql and sqlite in particular I could scan the folder structure with some tool or other and do an sql insert into the database and sync from there. Unless there is a tool set available for this type of operation.

    Any thoughts on this approach?



  • If you don’t need citation data associated with these items, you might consider using Tropy instead of Zotero (http://tropy.org). Tropy is designed by the same organization as Zotero but is more geared toward organization and annotation of primary sources (e.g., images and videos).
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