Put "watch folder" contents in collection
It would be very handy if Mendeley would offer more user-control to the automatic import via watch-folders.
For instance, it should be possible to specify that all documents that are imported from a specified watch-folder are automatically put into a collection. This makes it easier to find them later (otherwise they will disappear in the large database).
Tim Kietzmann
shared this idea
This has been reported to our Developers and various duplicate tickets have been merged to increase it’s priority (thanks to those who pointed them out).
35 comments
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Anonymous
commented
This is what I need as well - I have loads of folders with subfolders to organize my article collection currently, would love to use Mendeley as my library organizer because of all the tools you offer, but importing each folder manually is a lot of work!
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B
commented
It is absolutely essential. In fact, lack of this feature is what prevents me from starting using Mendeley seriously, as I download loads of articles and sorting every single one would be so annying.
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Edmund Laugasson
commented
In additional I would say, that Mendeley doesn't recognize symlinks in UNIX-based systems like Linux. I can't choose symlinked folder from home folder and it really disturbs...
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Edmund Laugasson
commented
I would also say, that I didn't turn on the File Organizer from settings but still it imported all my PDF-files and even renamed them in very ugly way - I didn't have yet time to correct all metadata and I got several files with name "Unnamed" etc...
I just don't want to use "Downloads" folder but only "Watched folder" to have better control over my library - with correct filenames and sorted into appropriate folders. -
Edmund Laugasson
commented
I had the case, where all documents were imported automatically from watched folder into Downloads folder but I didn't want it, because I have "Mendeley Desktop" folder already in Dropbox folder and also my watched folders are in Dropbox - so why duplicate all documents and waste space? Now I deleted all documents from Mendeley to free space but it seems like Mendeley will not show these watched folders and I'm stuck to get rid of this...
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Gabriel Aidra commented
ohh god please, make it happen!
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Manuel
commented
Yes ! That would be really cool. Essential even.
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luke
commented
Wow...I'm surprised at low vote count. This is basically why I have Mendeley and never use it. It's already suggested at two other locations. This one has the most votes: http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/332519-put-watch-folder-contents-in-collection#comments
This one has the fewest: http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/417706-add-the-option-of-converting-watched-folders-direc
I'm posting here because of the most recent activity, and "under review" status.
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Chris Castillo
commented
This would be a great implementation, I have hundreds of pdf's some of them relating to one topic, others to completely different topics. I assign them into subfolders in my machine and this would be a great way to search for them.
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MJH
commented
I think this is really important. I already have over a thousand pdfs organised into folders that suit me.
I think it's fantastic that I can tell Mendeley which folders on my hard disk to watch and it syncs and extracts citations. AMAZING!
But then it can't tell me which folder it came from ??!!! WTF?
This would allow me to choose which pdfs I sync to the server. It seems like a really obvious feature that is missing.
Otherwise, Mendeley would be a perfect paper management solution. As it is, I don't feel I can recommend this to colleagues and friends. : ( -
Krishna
commented
hmm.. THIS IS A MUST feature I was surprised it isn't there already. Am a person who just discovered this program ( am not a researcher but in my industry there r lots of papers to read regarding operational incidents etc).
I already have created folders in my HDD and collected documents ( word,pdf etc) in respective folders.
The first thing i assumed is watch folders would replicate the folder names or atleast give me the option to name the imported docs in a folder that I like. But it just grabs and puts it in main library !!! got to re do all the work again.!!!!
PLEASE INCLUDE THIS FEATURE -
Daniel
commented
This is a great suggestion. I already have my papers organized into different folders on my HDD. However, when I import them to Mendeley, all of that organization is lost. Ideally, Mendeley would see that an article came from a watched folder called, say, "neuroscience", and put in in a collection by the same name.
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MaciejJ
commented
Very good idea
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Ruggero Dondi
commented
automated folder creation during imports would be an alternative solution to this problem.
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Anonymous
commented
I'm a new Mendeley user and this is the first thing I noticed as a limiting feature. In other words, it would be a major plus for me.
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Marduk
commented
This is a request similar to http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/259129-autotag-pdf-files-using-folder-structure?ref=title which status is "under review". I think this is a very useful time-saving feature. Hopefully it isn't difficult to implement.
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Elliott Hauser
commented
Add 20 odd points to this suggestion- it is identical to this one:
http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/417706-add-the-option-of-converting-watched-folders-direcThis is a big deal because I'm importing about 200 pdfs a month and I don't have time to sort them since, because of spotty metadata extraction, I often have to open them in Mendeley desktop before I can sort them into collections. It's a huge time suck on top of the hand-entering metadata. Text extraction is a hard problem I'm willing to be patient for, but automatically linking new files from a specific watched folder into a specific collection is pretty simple...
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Elliott Hauser
commented
This is a duplicate request:
http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/332519-put-watch-folder-contents-in-collection
Should combine... -
Andres
commented
Robert.Knight response does nothing but support the idea. He says: well this is not a priority because you can do it manually. This is exactly what we are saying we do not want to do it manually. We want to do it once. The real case is that one is adding papers to 10 lines in ten folders.. Therefore automatical updating of the content of the folders into the corresponding collections is not just something "desirable": the truth is that it is something so trivial that it should be there from the begining... Maybe that's the reason many people prefer not to use watch folders.
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S
commented
This is a very important feature that no effective researcher could possible work without. Please make this a priority.
