Saving to Zotero: stay in the last folder after importing items from a web browser

edited October 29, 2019
Hi,
I have a huge number of items exported from Endnote and have to update manually their PubMed metadata. Now, this is very annoying:
- I'm in the Unfiled Items folder,
- I open an item online,
- I save it back to Zotero and..
- I'm kicked back to My Library, while I should stay in the Unfiled Items folder.

Please, make Zotero to stay in the last folder after importing items from a web browser.

Thanks!
  • Well, it does, in that, when possible, it saves to whatever is selected in Zotero. But Unfiled Items is an exception, because it's a virtual collection that can't be saved to. The logic here is that, if a view is read-only (e.g., Trash), it switches to a place it can actually save to (either the current library root or My Library if a read-only group library is selected) so that it can highlight the newly saved item.

    We might be able to make an exception to the exception for Unfiled Items, since newly added items would show up there and could be highlighted there, but we'll need to look into whether that's feasible. Issue created.
  • It would be great to make the exception for Unfiled Items, as this is the very folder users might want to stay in after importing new items.
    Thanks!
  • For the last few weeks I changed the way I saved from Firefox to Zotero in W10.
    For many months I selected first the collection and then had FF save to it. This method became ever so more difficult because the collections and subcollections multiplied and it took ever so much more time to find the desired collection. It's an imitation of Window's hierarchical file system model; whenever it got too large, I used Agent Ransack to find the correct folder. My mistake.

    I changed to have FF save to the My Library (1460 items) and tag the new item with at least a few general tags whenever I was in a hurry.

    Today, to my surprise, I discovered that the Unfiled Items collection contains 196 items which are also listed in My Library.

    1) Does "unfiled" mean that the item is not listed in at least one collection?
    2) How do I clear the Unfiled Items collection? Deleting an item also deletes it from My Library and stores it in the Trash collection.
    3) What changes do I make or what do I have to pay attention to so that FF stores an item in My Library?
    4) I thought about having a collection named "_Inbox". But it means that later, after completely tagging the item, I will have to move it to its proper collection or collections. Now I accomplish this by giving the item several "topic" tags which I prefix by "< " (less than and one space) so that they appear near the top of the list of tags. (I think of them as "pseudocollection")

    This is a wonderful program and I wish I had known about it many years ago. Agent Ransack will be used less often because the tags help me identify the items. Also it's faster.

    I'm looking forward to your suggestions. Thank you.
  • edited March 25, 2020
    1) Does "unfiled" mean that the item is not listed in at least one collection?
    Yes. That's the entire point of it.
    3) What changes do I make or what do I have to pay attention to so that FF stores an item in My Library?
    The library root always contains all items. See The Zotero Collections Model.
  • Thank you for having answered quickly.

    I began to use Zotero 8 months ago and consider myself a novice, learning slowly how to use it more efficiently.
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