"Show file" not working despite the PDF being available

edited March 17, 2023
Hello everyone,

I have just migrated from Mendeley to Zotero and am experiencing a few issues.

The step-by-step process:
I have downloaded Zotero and changed the "Data Directory Location" from the Default (/Users/me/Zotero) to a subfolder (/Users/me/Documents/Zotero). I have copy-pasted the database files from one folder to the other following the suggestion from Zotero. Finally, I imported my online Mendeley library. This created a single folder under my Zotero library (with today's date) with all my subfolders, which I have then manually moved into the root. In the Data Directory, in the storage subfolder, I can see a list of sub-folders with random names with inside of them all my pdfs. If I double click on any pdf in Zotero, it will correctly open it.

The problem: when I select a pdf in Zotero, right click and choose "show file", only my user directory (/Users/me) is opened, and not the one with the pdf. This is very annoying, since I want to be able to locate all my pdfs.

Can anybody help me fix this? Thank you very much

Note: I'm on MacOS 11.4
  • edited March 17, 2023
    You're saying if you double-click on the item in Zotero the PDF opens, but if you then do a Show File immediately after that it shows your home directory? Or does it work after you've opened the file once via Zotero?

    Note that if you have the Documents folder set to sync via iCloud (the "Desktop & Documents" setting), you need to move the Zotero data directory out of there, as the data directory can't be in a cloud storage folder. And if it is there, even files appearing in Finder may not actually be present on the system.

    In any case, the best we can suggest is to move the data directory back to the default location, which will almost certainly fix this.
  • edited March 17, 2023
    "You're saying if you double-click on the item in Zotero the PDF opens, but if you then do a Show File immediately after that it shows your home directory? Or does it work after you've opened the file once via Zotero?"

    The former is true. It never works regardless of what I do in Zotero.

    Regarding the iCloud storage: thanks for pointing this out, but I was already aware of the potential issues after going through the documentation. This shouldn't impact my case since iCloud is disabled for the Documents folder in my system.

    I can confirm that moving the folder to the default location fixes the issue. This is fine as a workaround but it is clearly a bug, any chance this could be fixed in a future update?

    Thanks in the meantime
  • It's not something we can fix. We have a standard call for revealing a folder in the OS, and it's up to the system to show the right folder. This also works fine for me with a data directory of ~/Documents/Zotero on macOS 13.2.1, so it's not a general problem.

    You should double-check the "Desktop & Documents Folders" setting to ensure that's disabled, but if it is then there's something else about your system that's causing the OS not to properly show the folder. I'm afraid that's all I can tell you.
  • I see, weird. I'll see if I can troubleshoot further. Thanks
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