possible to import pdf's as links, not copies?

dirgles
I have a pretty big database that I'm trying to import into Zotero (which I love by the way!), and I'm having a problem: all of my entries link to pdf files. I've tried several different export formats and none seem to preserve this link when I import into Zotero (this isn't yet another internal-pdf:// issue). All except RIS seem to drop the link.

The problem is that even with an RIS import, there seems to be no way to generate attachments as pdf *links* rather pdf *copies* (stored in Zotero's DB). I tried RIS's "UR", "L1", and "L2" fields, and they all produce the same result. Is there a way around this? The DB I'm trying to import is way too big to manually change all of the pdf copies back to links.
Thanks!
  • jackerman
    I'm having the exact same problem.
    Anyone?
  • amy.bowen
    I have the same question. I don't want to make copies of all 4000 PDFs to be stored in Zotero's folder for several reasons:

    1) I want to be able to access my PDF library through Windows Explorer, where the PDFs are all in one massive folder.

    2) When I open an imported PDF through Zotero, it is read-only.

    3) Even if the PDF opened through Zotero wasn't read-only, I would be making changes to a copy rather than the original file, and that is a huge problem for me as an obsessive highlighter/bookermarker of my PDFs.

    4) I don't have the hard drive space to store a copy of each PDF just to use in Zotero.

    5) The copies of the PDFs in Zotero are all titled Full Text (PDF). I know it's not renaming the actual file, and I know I can right-click and have it renamed by the parent metadeta, but I don't want to do that 4000 times.

    This is the only thing keeping me from diving head-in to Zotero. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out if it's possible to make Zotero link to the PDF in its original place on my hard drive, to no avail. I also tried to have it import a shortcut (.lnk) rather than copy the file location itself, but I didn't get very far.

    EndNote creates a link to the file rather than copy it, shouldn't Zotero be able to? This seems like a rather crucial option to have. Either I am dense and just not seeing how to do it, or it's just not possible in Zotero, which will unfortunately mean I'll have to put off adopting it for now.

    (Much appreciation to the developers, nonetheless. It's days like this where I REALLY wish I could put all my other obligations aside and learn to code.)
  • amy.bowen
    Related issue:
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8584/drag-links-to-files/
  • mark
    Re point 5 — you can actually solve that in three clicks by doing an advanced search for all PDF attachments, saving the search, selecting all of those PDFs, right-clicking and selecting 'Rename File from Parent metadata'. This will take quite some time but it will work.

    Point 2 I've never encountered, so it must be something peculiar to your configuration.
  • tghoward
    And I, too, would like to do the exact same thing that the first poster expressed a desire for. I've found that I *can* make a link to pdfs using the gui, but for an import of thousands of records, this is unfeasible.
  • adamsmith
    I'm just wondering - wouldn't it be possible to create a virtual folder with all pdfs on your OS? Then you can use the "link to file" feature to import large batches of files at once - probably not more than 50 or so, but that'd be the same for getting pdfs stored in Zotero. The retrieve metadata function still works for links. Am I overlooking something?

    You can then combine this with Zotfile for a future workflow.
  • tghoward
    Interesting idea; I do have a lot of pdfs that are old enough not to have metadata, unfortunately, and I already have the bibliographic entries in RIS format (came from RefMan in my case). So it would be best to be able to use the RIS entries I already have. The problem is that we don't want the actual pdf stored within zotero, just the link to our file system. Zotfile looks very interesting - I'll look into that.
  • adamsmith
    ah yes, but in that situation my suggestion doesn't help much - that would just be helpful if you never had used a reference manager before and just had a large collection of pdfs. With an RIS file I don't have a good idea what to do - it'd be nice to improve the "link" feature.
  • fcc
    I have posted a possible solution in http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/18052/ris-import-link-not-file/
    I would be grateful whenever anybody finds a way to implement something following that line.
  • atenrok
    same problem here. It's been two years and still no solution?
  • mmauersberger
    When you import a library file like *.bib then you can choose now, if you want to preserve links or copy files from links into the Zotero storage.

    Now I have he problem that I can't preserve links (same option as above), when I import from clipboard. But I think it is as important as the import feature for *.bib files.

    Has anybody an idea how to make that possible?

    Best regards
  • bwiernik
    That’s not currently possible. @dstillman Is adding a pop up dialog with the option, alternative shortcut that preserves links, or preference to control the behavior for import from clipboard something that could be added?
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