Manually adding metadata to entry

Smitty_W
I recently donwloaded Zotero for macOS, and dragged a bunch of pdfs for indexing purposes. A largish number of those documents were not filed, and I'm looking for a way of fixing this.

So far, I can look up the ISBN of the document, add it via the magic wand, and then delete the original unfiled item, but doing this for every item will take a long time.

Is there a faster way of doing this? Perhaps something that doesn't need to create a new item and can just modify the already existing one?

Thanks!
  • dstillman
    edited October 5, 2020
    Metadata updating is planned, but this sounds like perhaps partly a misunderstanding. If a PDF isn't recognized, it will remain a standalone attachment, not a regular item with metadata. If you then add a regular item by ISBN/DOI/etc. or by saving from the browser, you wouldn't delete the previous standalone attachment unless a PDF was also attached to the regular item — normally you'd want to drag the standalone PDF attachment on top of the new item. For books in particular, I'd be surprised if you were regularly getting PDFs attached via Add Item by Identifier.

    The only difference metadata updating would bring is that you could right-click on the PDF, choose Create Parent Item, paste in an identifier, and choose to update metadata, but wouldn't be all that much quicker or simpler than just saving a regular item and dragging the existing PDF on top of it. (If it's a big list, it might help to drag batches of standalone attachments into a temporary collection so everything remains in view while you work on them.)
  • Smitty_W
    Ah, I hadn't noticed that dragging things into the new item worked. I was attaching the pdf to the new item by just locating the document in my directory, which is obviously worse.

    Thanks!
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