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Comment by TheCabin | Hacker News Reader

I used Zotero quite a bit in the past, the thing that ultimately drove me away is that when synchronizing you couldn't easily access the PDFs just via the filesystem. I use a nextcloud and also wanted to access PDFs from devices without Zotero installed and this turned out to be a pain at the time. Is this possible with more recent Zotero versions? Is the sync still cumbersome with a zotero account + self-hosted webdav?

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I have a similar setup (Zotero + dropbox). Zotero syncs the entries and any notes, but dropbox takes care of the pdf storage. You can swap out dropbox for your storage of choice.

I use zotfile (http://zotfile.com) to handle this.

Files are all stored in a single folder (which can be in different locations depending on computer) which I point zotfile to. Inside that each paper is put into a folder based on author names. And each pdf is then renamed based on authors, year, and title.

All of the above is customizable and automated.

I can’t recommend ZotFile enough. It, along with Zotero, have basically solved cross-platform cross-device reading and reference management for me.

Another +1 for Zotfile, but Z6 looks like it bakes in some of zotfile's features.

I'm glad it includes some, but perhaps not the feature of storing pdfs in a different place so they can be easily synced via Dropbox? While I'd like to have as few extensions as possible, maybe I'll neat to keep Zotfile around regardless.

There is a plugin called Zotfile that makes this easier.

But in some ways Zotero 6 makes filesystem workflows more complicated, in that PDF annotations don't get stored as actual annotations in the PDFs.

You don't have to use their system, you can just use your standard pdf viewer too.

Zotfile is an extension that automatically converts internally stored pdfs to links in a filesystem directory -- the latter can be synchronized and accessed however you please.

It's been working great for me, although recent versions have a problem that it no longer recognizes the root directory and pollutes the zotero database with machine-specific absolute paths ((

You can still access the pdf file via the file system by right clicking on the item and 'show file'. The files names may not be user friendly though.

zotfile plugin, mentioned above in this thread, makes file names user friendly.

There is handy functionality to rename pdf files based on parent metadata. I think you can set this up to be done automatically on import too.

This is great to have consistent filenames from lots of different sources. Of course if the metadata is wrong or missing, it won't help.

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