Download multiple PDFs to computer

Because there is no offline mode, downloading PDFs to your local computer is necessary. Currently, some people use google drive’s sync to handle this. There are two issues with that: (1) google drive doesn’t organize papers by paperpile’s subfolders, and (2) on linux there is no official google drive client.

As a result, downloading papers is currently necessary. Paperpile could make this much easier if they allowed local download of multiple papers by shift-selecting them.

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For my case, I use the program Goodsync to “mirror” the Paperpile’s folder in my google drive, onto to my local USB drive.

Reason being - i try not to do 2-way sync, in case I corrupt the intricate linking in the google drive folder. So far, I can see the alphabetical folder structure and its contents.

But still no notes… Maybe a mirroring alternative might exist on Linux.

I have been using Insync (https://www.insynchq.com) as a Google Drive client on Linux which works extremely well, not only for Paperpile. The few dollars they charge for a permanent license is more than justified.

I have been using Mendeley in conjunction with Paperpile. Mendeley beats Paperpile hands down in PDF search, does not require browser, so can be used offline, and their Android app is a lot more mature. I use it on Mac, so I sync PDFs with Google Drive client, but perhaps you can get their paid plan, or fit your PDFs in the free quota.

Like Thomas_Girke mentioned, Insync is really good and powerful Google Drive client for Linux. It also works really well with Paperpile. Paperpile syncs all files to Google Drive, and with Insync you can then choose whether to sync all of these files to your drive, or just the ‘starred papers’.

As a workaround, I sent all the papers of which I wanted to have the pdfs to a shared folder. Then I copied the share link, and downloaded them with a python web-crawler script to my computer. Script can be found here: https://gist.github.com/mluerig/3ec0a506afeb5a10439cff314f3786ee

I wish I wouldn’t have to do this though - such an important feature, and it should be easy to implement, no?

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