iTunes has third-party plugins (well .. Applescripts, I guess) that help configure this sort of thing. Mendeley either needs an interface for user-contributed plug-ins, or it needs the functionality built-in .....

I agree absolutely that there should be more user controls for handling case in Detail pane fields (title, author, etc.); it's a pain when Mendeley imports the title in all caps for whatever reason, and one has to correct it manually. However, I can also imagine situations where titles contain acronyms, etc. that need to be define to appear in all caps. Possibly it should be made possible for the user to select some or all of the text in a field, and apply changes (all caps, all lowercase, initial caps, etc.) as necessary to the selection. It would be even cleverer if it were possible to define sets of words that should be generally left in lowercase (for example, in English, prepositions in titles, etc.). However, even should this be sorted out, some citation formats use "Title Case" in titles while others use "Sentence case", and the citation formatting that Mendeley uses would have to be smart enough to know about this (and, to be useful, know what to do with acronyms). So this is all quite tricky :) but it should nevertheless not be rocket science to figure out ways to implement something more graceful than what there is now.

the default ordering of fields in the (right-hand side) document details panel is not always convenient when manually entering information (especially for books, which still have no automatic ISBN-based lookup). For example, although the title and author fields are up near the top together, the editor field often needed for books, book sections, and conference proceedings) is much further down the list of fields; translators, likewise, are banished down towards the bottom of the pane. Also, one often enters date, publisher, and city information together (from the pages of bibliographic details in the front of a book or proceedings volume), but these fields are scattered and widely separated from each other.

These may seem minor issues, but making it possible for user to reorder the fields for different document types should, I would think, be relatively easy to implement, and would reduce some of the tedium of manual detail entry.

I see this is still "planned", but as Mustaqil's message of reassurance was posted (as I write) "about 1 year ago", I wonder whether there is any news of progress on this issue? Still "planned", or now "parked" ....?

Ah, I failed to find that thread in my searches! But, yeah: looks like basically the same issue. Could the threads/issues be merged?

Yes, some kind of user-friendly option for "sneaker net" syncing and "restore from local backup" (insofar as those can be usefully distinguished) would be very welcome. Better abilities to write metadata into the PDFs would make it easier for to find (perhaps automatically) searching the "right" PDF when using a local library with its metadata sync'd up-to-date but without the actual PDFs. An online sync option could then sync both metadata and the associated PDF files, while an online storage option could sync and store metadata and files alike. But I still see online storage as being a tough area to play in. Companies like SugarSync and Dropbox offer vastly more storage space for the price. And perhaps it's only a matter of time before some clever soul builds BitTorrent technology into reference management software that lets people start performing online sync of associated PDFs with virtually no need for storage per se.

True, it is nominally in conflict with Mendeley's revenue model, but I think that a revenue model based on selling online storage is quite possibly doomed anyway. Inevitably, potential Mendeley users will be wanting to store things besides their PDF libraries online, and I doubt Mendeley could (or should) compete in the general cloud storage market. Mendeley's strengths are not, IMO, in storage. Also IMO, trying to play as if they were will only encourage some open source app that _does_ work with third party sync or storage to come along and upstage them. Mendeley is not alone in the reference management, or even PDF research library management spaces, so focusing on user experience there is (again, IMO) critical.

In any case, portable storage is probably growing faster than document file size. At the moment, I have not quite 64 GB of library over 4x larger than Mendeley's largest standard storage package; with 64GB pen drives now around USD 120, I could store and transport that library for a year for the same price as a year of 15GB storage with Mendeley. Sure, "fire-and-forget" online sync (or storage) would have its advantages -- but so many advantages that I would want to pay what I assume would be much for for the amount of required storage with Mendeley? Very unlikely. Maybe Mendeley can sell storage to users with small libraries for a while, but I don't the online storage game is something they can play in forever -- not with anything like the current relative princing/capacity structure, anyway.

I still haven't entirely figured out how placing/moving entries around in groups affects file placement/movement! It seems like things that go into "Groups" somehow get treated differently than things that go into folders of "My Library". This seems to have weird effects in some cases; for example, I can set a folder in my library to sync files over the 'Net, but I can't do this for a public Group that I have created and own. This means that I need to create a separate "Topic X" folder in "My Library" and "Topic X" Group, then try to manually ensure that I add appropriate entries to both the folder and the Group (in order to ensure 1) files associated with a new entry are sync'd for my own use via the folder, and 2) entries added to the group are visible to other members). Rather cumbersome ....

I can easily see why implementing this issue is not straightforward: collections are more like iTunes "playlists" or iPhoto "albums" than they are like iTunes albums or iPhoto Events, because individual items/files might well be in multiple collections. But, equally, the current system is unreasonably limited: so many items are from non-journal sources (books, etc.), organizing by author or year is just unwieldy, and organizing by title is just ... weird. Still, something is needed! Personally, I would suggest the implementation of smart collections ("tags" are not enough), though that's sort of a different issue, and then an option to "export" the files associated with a collection or a selection to a new user-designated location. This would me you could organize your access (through the desktop app) much more flexibly, but still quickly cough out all the specific files you needed if you wanted to do something else with them.

I think the trick with this issue is not so much the programming, per se, but nailing down just how this should work (with regards to individual entries and files that appear in multiple collections). Multiple copies of files in different sub-folders would be inefficient (and probably painful to keep synchronized); aliases/shortcuts/symlinks would be better than multiple files, but perhas potentially painful to implement in libraries that are being used cross-platform (as I suspect many users' Mendeley libraries may be). Going with an option to "export" a copy of a collection to its own discrete folder would perhaps not be ideal, but could at least be a functional and useable solution for many usage cases.

Some kind of solution for the issue is clearly needed. I only hope that it will also help simplify the issue of manually syncing collections between dispersed libraries on multiple computers (in the many cases where complete libraries are simply too big to sync online via Mendeley.com).

Here's a idea .... I see how it could get complicated to handle files that appear in multiple collections (and implementing system of automatic aliases/shortcuts/symlinks/etc. could likewise get funky.) Still, there is surely utility in being able to quickly scoop up all the files from a particular collection .... What if we took the model here of iPhoto, rather than iTunes, and even though we might keep all the files together in a single library folder, there were an option to "Export" the files of a collection -- effectively copying all the files associated with a particular collection to a new user-specified folder/location? This might get around the issue how how to handle the placement of files in multiple collections, but still enable easy access to the group of files identified as belonging to a particular collection.

It would also, at the very least, be helpful if Mendeley became clever enough to substitute an "editor" name in cases where there is an editor but no author. (As happens all the time in books/proceedings that collect multiple articles, or modern editions of anonymous pre-modern texts, etc.).

Although the "AWOL files" issue is something rather different from organizing file by collection, it might be a good idea if Mendeley had the capability to search HDs (internal and external) for PDF file names that it had in its database, so that it could then tell you "I found file X which I think is associated with file-less Entry Y. Do you want to associate them?". And, if "Yes", then it could copy File X back into whatever directory you current have set as the place-to-keep-stuff (or into the appropriate collection sub-folder, if that gets implemented!).

An option, at least, to auto-organize files into sub-folders would be useful. And for papers in multiple collections, a sensible approach would be for Mendeley to auto-generate aliases/shortcuts in different folders to the actual file in a particular folder. (I am not sure it matters where the original copy would live, as opposed to where the aliases/shortcuts would be created, but this too could be made configurable, I suppose.)

Alas, although I encourage my colleagues and students to use Mendeley, I am very far from the ears of those with the purse strings. I would actually suggest that Mendeley's salespeople be out there knocking on institutional doors. That might offer more opportunity for success than lone individuals within institutions asking administrators, "Hey, please spend a pile of money on this thing you have never heard of and don't understand in any case!". ;)

I'm likewise dubious about Mendeley's aspirations to sell cloud storage on an _individual_ basis; possibly it would be more plausible to convince _institutions_ to shell out for group subscriptions? OK, institutions are all cash-strapped -- but then so are their members, who may think more than twice about shelling out their own money for what is, essentially, a work-related tool. (Yeah, everyone brings their work home -- but they may not want to _pay_ to bring their work home! Or at the very least, they may want someone else to pay.) In any case, I wonder at the wisdom of a strategy that seeks to convince individual users to pay what is (at the end of the day) considerably more than cloud storage currently costs under many other consumer models.

Yes, I find myself now running sort of "semi-parallel" library organization systems: my original manually organized-by-folders (and very large, spacewise) collection of PDFs on my home machine (a Mac), and a newer Mendeley Desktop library on my university machine (a Windows PC), and a Mendeley Destop library also on the Mac at home, with some folders sync'd between the work PC and home Mac via the Internet -- though of course not all, as 500 MB is waaay too small to sync my whole home library, and no current USB flash drive I've seen could hold it all either. Still, if base-paths could be specified, then I could get all my old manually organized library on the home Mac moved into Mendeley, and then use a USB drive to sync it on a perhaps folder-by folder basis to the PC at work. That would still be a bit crude, but it would work, at least!

@Patrick: You might be right about the pro accounts -- though as it happens, the pro accounts would not be what I want anyway. I want syncing, rather than all my docs floating around out in the cloud. In my context (South America), Internet access is better than one might think, but hardly always on or accessible in all the places I might want to access my files -- but I have plenty of local storage (hard disks, USB drives, etc.) at my disposal. I would actually be more willing to pay a shareware-ish price for the capacity to sync local collections (via transfer over the Internet, as opposed to storage via the Internet) than I would for more online storage. After all, my total collection is far larger than the subset I'm using at any given time (none of the preset pro storage packages offer enough space for my whole collection anyway), so paying more to host a larger collection is not terribly attractive -- but seamless multi-machine cross-platform syncing WOULD BE attractive ....

I would agree with the comments that some kind of facility to help synchronize collections across multiple machines would be incredibly useful -- if not via a native feature built into Mendeley, then perhaps as suggested through integration with some third-party service? There's another thread about such an idea: http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/528303-file-transfer-or-mirroring-instead-of-online-stora

I'd like to see this as well. Online storage is a nice idea, but I too have far more than 500 MB of files (several GB, at least, and growing) that I really want to somehow synchronize across multiple machines with different platforms (mostly Windows and OS X). Defining an appropriate base path on each different machine would then work as long as I could manually attach the appropriate PDF file to the appropriate entry locally. (I.e. add a file and entry to one machine during the day, sync the library entries on another machine at night and add the associated PDF to the local collection).