Easy way to export all the .html files from a collection?

jpguarnieri · August 14, 2023

I'm saving a bunch of internet pages for future research. Zotero saves them as .html. I'd like to backup them to be safe, but when I'm exporting a collection I don't have the option to export the .html files.
Is there a way to do so? Or, if that's not possible, do any of the formats avaliable in the export collection feature preserve the webpage itself, instead of just the text?

tim820 · August 15, 2023

They will be saved in your backup of your Zotero files (they exist as html files in local Zotero storage folders, and so would be the same in your backup). Of course everyone should have created such a backup (check the forum for messages like "I lost all my data" for those people who didn't do this). And exporting collections is not the way to backup your Zotero data/files ...
https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#backing_up_your_zotero_data

If you want to see just the html files, you can navigate in your operating system file system to your Zotero\storage folder (or its backup) and do a search for *.html under that hierarchy.

jpguarnieri · August 15, 2023

I see. My problem at the moment is I'm trying to get the files from a specific collection, and Zotero doesn't group the backed up files by collection. Of course, I could manually look for each .html file, but I was wondering whether there's an easier way as I have lots of saved pages in that collection and it keeps growing.

dstillman · August 15, 2023

You can export the collection to Zotero RDF with files.

johnmy · August 16, 2023

I developed a plugin, https://github.com/redleafnew/delitemwithatt
, it could export the attachments to a specific folder.

dstillman · August 16, 2023

Note, too, that if these snapshots were created since November 2020 (when Zotero started saving single-file snapshots), you can also just select the attachment items and drag them to a filesystem folder, and Zotero will copy all of the HTML files to that folder.

To select many snapshots at once, you can search for something like "snapshot" in All Fields & Tags mode, click in the items list, and use Select All (Ctrl/Cmd-A) to select all the snapshots together. (You might need to deselect some parent items that matched.)