PDFs received by email

Hi, I think we all receive PDFs of papers by email. What is the current best way to get them into Paperpile? Saving to the hard drive and then importing them?

It seems that the email-to-paperpile feature is in the works, but I was wondering if in the meantime it is possible for example to save the PDFs to a google drive folder that is watched by Paperpile.

Thanks!

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Link to old post requesting a watch folder…

We don’t have plans for a watched folder at the moment. For privacy reasons it’s hard to implement. Paperpile can’t just read some files from your Google Drive (that’s a good thing…).

If you open the file from Gmail in the default Google Chrome browser, you can just click the “P” button and import the file like that. That used to be the default behaviour in Gmail, I don’t know what’s the fastest way at the moment because it now opens by default by the Google Drive viewer and not the built in Chrome viewer.

If you click “Download” it opens in the default Chrome Viewer but it’s already saved on your local hard disk. So Paperpile can’t read this copy either (again, that’s a good thing that Paperpile can’t read your files on your hard disk).

If anyone has a trick how to open the cloud copy of a Gmail attached PDF in the default Chrome Viewer, I’d be very interested. From there it’s just a click to import the file to Paperpile.

  1. Right click pdf in gmail
  2. Select “Open in new tab” - The PDF opens in the default Chrome viewer
  3. Click the Paperpile-button

Thanks, but unfortunately that does not work for me.

It does open a PDF in the default chrome viewer, but the Paperpile button says “No papers were found in this tab.”

Thanks for following up!
Giovanni

Thanks so much! I did not realize the link that opens the internal JS controlled viewer is actually a proper link that when opened in a new tab shows the PDF in the default viewer.

Are you sure you have opened the PDF link as suggested? It should open a normal PDF in the default viewer. In that case it’s always possible to import the PDF. You should never see “Could not find…” What’s the URL you are seeing?

I just tried again and it works! I might have tried “Open Link in a New Window” which does not work, even though the link shown seems to be the same ("https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=…).
Thanks @toresalte and @stefan!
giovanni