Upgrade Storage“Rename File from Parent Metadata”: Please assess or expand on this idea.
Background: I'm a Zotero beginner, currently organizing about 800 academic journal entries. I've noticed that the “Rename File from Parent Metadata” option sometimes appears and sometimes doesn't.
Idea:
In Zotero 7, “Rename File from Parent Metadata” changes the file name of attachments, not their titles. To use this feature, the selected item needs to be an attachment with a parent item.
Here are two things I found to watch out for when batch renaming:
If you search for “PDF” within a collection, select all results, and right-click, sometimes the option is missing. This is because the search is fuzzy—it matches not only items with PDF attachments, but also items where “PDF” appears in the title or abstract. For example, in a collection with 1,000 items, if 300 parent items have PDF attachments and 1 standalone item has “PDF” in its abstract but no PDF attachment, the search will show these 301 items. For these, right-clicking won't show “Rename File from Parent Metadata.”
For more precise results, use Advanced Search: set “Attachment Type” + “is” + “PDF” and enable “Search subcollections.” This will accurately find all PDF files. Next, you can sort by item type to quickly identify standalone attachments and temporarily delete them (to restore later), and use date filters rather than collection filters. For instance, searching by “Date Added” + “is” + “XX” works better than by “Collection” + “is” + “XX,” since only standalone attachments have collection metadata. Child attachments do not.
Idea:
In Zotero 7, “Rename File from Parent Metadata” changes the file name of attachments, not their titles. To use this feature, the selected item needs to be an attachment with a parent item.
Here are two things I found to watch out for when batch renaming:
If you search for “PDF” within a collection, select all results, and right-click, sometimes the option is missing. This is because the search is fuzzy—it matches not only items with PDF attachments, but also items where “PDF” appears in the title or abstract. For example, in a collection with 1,000 items, if 300 parent items have PDF attachments and 1 standalone item has “PDF” in its abstract but no PDF attachment, the search will show these 301 items. For these, right-clicking won't show “Rename File from Parent Metadata.”
For more precise results, use Advanced Search: set “Attachment Type” + “is” + “PDF” and enable “Search subcollections.” This will accurately find all PDF files. Next, you can sort by item type to quickly identify standalone attachments and temporarily delete them (to restore later), and use date filters rather than collection filters. For instance, searching by “Date Added” + “is” + “XX” works better than by “Collection” + “is” + “XX,” since only standalone attachments have collection metadata. Child attachments do not.
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dstillmanDon't waste time on this. Files are renamed automatically when you add them to Zotero. If you've made additional changes to item data or have changed the renaming format and some filenames are out of sync, you can try the Zotero 8 beta, which automatically keeps existing filenames in sync as you edit item data and has a feature to rename all existing files to match the current renaming format.
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wind7Thank you. Previously, I searched for "zotero8" on search engines but couldn’t find any relevant files, so I had been using zotero 7.0.26. I have now downloaded and installed it. Looking forward to it.