With Zotero 7 what is best method of accessing a collection of PDFs from multiple devices

Simon Cropper · 2025-09-11T07:06:13+00:00

I want to be able to review a collection of references on multiple devices (Linux, windows, android). I have a very large library but want to only work on 50-100 references - for the short term - in this way. What is the best method of doing this? Historically I used ZotFile to send PDFs to a directory and inserted comments and highlights in the PDFs directly, then sucked the annotations back into the library. ZotFile no longer works. What is the best method to emulate this functionality or do something similar?

tim820 · 2025-09-11T07:34:36+00:00

Zotmoov replicates Zotfile's old send/get from tablet (or other device) via its custom menus.
https://github.com/wileyyugioh/zotmoov/blob/master/docs/CUSTOM_MENUITEM_INFO.md

Simon Cropper · 2025-09-16T06:34:47+00:00

Hi tim820, I have tested this and eventually got it working - that is, copy to a directory and on return import back to where it was originally and save annotations to a date-time stamped note file.

If you send a file repetitively to the tablet and re-import it, the annotations will be re-imported multiple times. A bit frustrating but not to much of a problem.

If my memory serves me right ZotFile would copy the PDF to a sub-directory the same name as the sub-collection. I can't seem to get this to work. I suspect wildcards are required but I can't find any documentation on how wildcards are used.