Download PDF from a collection

suatri
Hello, I want to download the attached files in a zotero collection to my local drive in a single folder ( I don't want to go one by one). I'm doing this to run a language learning model on the pdfs. To clarify, I'm looking for a quick way to download a bath of PDFs (not interested in notes, highlights or tags) from a collection. Thank you for your help
  • adamsmith
    When you say "download" -- does that mean you're using the web library? If so, use the webAPI and pyZotero. There's no GUI way to do this.

    This can be done (e.g. with a saved search & drag+drop) in the local software.
  • suatri
    I mainly use the desktop app. Can you walk me through the webAPI pyzotero process?
  • dstillman
    But do you really mean you're trying to download files from Zotero servers, not just save them from a collection in the desktop app?
  • suatri
    That is correct. All I want to do is download say 100 PDF I have in a collection and run it through text analysis tools, word count, topic modeling, etc. And I want to save myself the time of going through each document in Zotero asking for the location, copy paste into another folder 100 times. I just figure before I embark on that multi day activity I ask the experts.
    Thank you for your patience understanding my inquiry.
  • adamsmith
    Right, but that means you're not downloading. If you have the Zotero app, the items are already on your computer (assuming you're synced in full).

    Quickest would probably to export the collection to RIS with files, then create a search for PDFs in the exported folder in your operating system to get all PDFs in a single folder.
    It should, in principle, be possible to just search for PDFs in a collection and pull them out of Zotero, but the behavior of the advanced search function is a bit wonky in that respect.
  • suatri
    That did it. Thank you very much.
  • dstillman
    We're going to fix the search behavior, but in the Zotero 7 beta you can also just select all items in the collection and do File → "Export PDFs….". (There's a bug in the current beta where that fails if any files are missing locally, but I've fixed that for the next beta.)
  • ckmatingou
    Very helpful, thanks!
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