I’m trying to use Paperpile on iOS. It seems to only see my personal library. Is there a way to make other libraries visible? I don’t see anything in the settings of the app.
Thank you,
Brandon
Welcome to our forum, @Brandon_Hill! Currently, only your personal library is available in our mobile apps; shared libraries are not available and can’t be made visible.
A possible workaround is that you can add copies of papers in shared libraries to your personal library, which will allow you to read them in our mobile apps. You can learn how to add copies of papers in your shared libraries to your personal library here. But I’ve added your +1 for this request for having shared libraries on our mobile apps to our internal feature tracker for consideration by the team.
Hi Suzanne,
Thank you for your reply. It is helpful to know the limitation so I don’t spend more time trying to figure out how to make the app do something it can’t.
It doesn’t bring up a different challenge then. I’ve got almost 2000 papers across my libraries. Dragging all references in one library to another works fine. But I’ve also built an organization system of almost 200 folders that aren’t in my personal library. Out of those, in the web app, I was able to drag only two of those from a shared library to the personal library. When dragging any of the others, no new folder gets created in the personal library. Is there anything I need to do so that a folder can be dragged from one library to another?
Presuming the answer is no. I also tried to manual recreating some folders in the personal library. Then I’d select all the references in the twin folder from the shared library and drag them to the new folder in the personal library. It doesn’t work. I just get a message that says “All references already exist in this library.” Is there something I need to do?
At the core, I’m trying to figure how to avoid reclassifying all 2,000 papers just to be able to read them on my iPad. It seems like the capabilities are there. I did drag two folders (one with subfolders). There is just some magic property that some folders have that allow this and others don’t. What do I need to do not have to redo all my organizational work?
Thank you,
Brandon
Thanks for following up, @Brandon_Hill. I will ask the team about the dragging of folders from shared libraries to your personal library issue that you have experienced; I can reproduce it on my end.
When you tried manually recreating folders in your personal library and then tried dragging the references from the folder in your shared library to the one in the personal library, did you select the Keep duplicates option? If you do that, they should be copied over. On the other hand, if you select Skip duplicates, they won’t be appear in the folder in your personal library.
I don’t get the Keep Duplicates options. I just get “All 3 references are already in your library” and the new folder remains empty. Now if I alter the reference in someway in the shared library (like delete the PDF) and then drag and drop, I get the Keep/Skip Duplicates option. This seems like a bug. If you are copying over exact duplicate references then it presumes there is no work to be done. But it means that the folder structure gets ignored.
I could use this to hack around the bug (in theory). Just select all items in my shared library and alter some metadata field. This would make all entries different between the two libraries. However, the new version of Paperpile seems to have eliminated the ability to trigger consolidating duplicates by the user. Is there a way to merge duplicates once I’ve copied everything over? It would solve my problem if I could.
Ok, merely adding a new metadata field was not enough to allow drag and drop. My hack would not work.
Thank you for letting me know what you tried, @Brandon_Hill. I checked with the product team, and dragging the references into your library from a shared library doesn’t occur if the references are already in your library, as you reported (in a shared library, these references are indicated by a dot next to each title). I was able to reproduce this scenario for references already in my library. But I’ve shared your use case with the team and they will consider it as usability feedback.
Thank you for your help with this. If the ability doesn’t exist so be it. So what do I do? I’ve put all my organization into my shared library. And that seems logical. Half the point of Paperpile was to share papers with the students who try to help with our research. Until I had an iPad the personal library was nothing more than annoyance. Whenever I downloaded a new paper, Paperpile would default to the personal library and then I’d also have to save to the shared library where I would then put it into a reasonable folder. So my personal library and shared libraries are almost twins, except the personal library lacks any organization.
I could in theory delete everything in the personal library and then drag references over. The problem is that it isn’t a perfect copy of the shared library. It has some files that aren’t in my shared library (about 300). Is there any way to compare the two libraries first? I need to be able to select all the items in my personal library that are also in the shared library but not the ones unique to the personal library.
I like Paperpile a lot. But the notion of needed to re-create all of my organizational structure to read papers on an iPad seems extreme. And once done, I’d have to keep up the work of doing everything twice (once in shared and once in personal). I’d appreciate any guidance.