Automatically create parent item when metadata retrieval does not work

leiffredrickson
I am wondering if there is a way to have Zotero automatically create a parent items for PDFs that I add in cases where the automatic metadata retrieval does not work. What I am hoping is that there might be a way for Zotero to just automatically create a generic (document) parent item using the file name.

I want this because I am using ZotFile to place my PDFs in a specific folder in Dropbox. This is on Windows computer and I often use the Windows search function to search for keywords across many files in my PDF library. But I can't move files with ZotFile to that library unless there is a parent for the PDF. And I have a few thousand files for which one cannot be automatically generated with metadata retrieval. Someday I would like to go in and manually put in good parent info for these files. But that will take awhile. And for now, I would love it if I could move all of these to my PDFs library so that I can search them with other files easily.

I hope that at least makes sense! And would love to know if there is a way to do this so I can create a basic parent item for a big batch of PDFs so that I can move them quickly. The titles could even all be "untitled" for now or something. Just a placeholder so I can move them with ZotFile.
  • denlinkd
    In those cases, it would probably work to drag the problem PDFs into your Zotero library, select all, and right click "Create Parent Item," then have ZotFile rename and relocate the PDFs.
  • denlinkd
    It will create a "Document" item type with the filename as the Title.
  • leiffredrickson
    Thank you so much! I guess since there was not an option for automatically creating a parent item when you right click on a single PDF in Zotero, I thought that would not work for multiple selections. Anyway, thanks again.
  • denlinkd
    It should work the exact same way on a single PDF. You do have to hit "Manual entry."
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