I seem to have mangled my syncing: somehow I ended up with several Paperpile folders in my google drive. I tried the naive approach of putting all “Z” PDFs in the currently active Z folder and that didn’t seem to work (makes sense, due to PP’s privacy privileges being limited, which I appreciate!). So I deleted all the paperpile folders except the one that seemed to be actually mine. Nevertheless, there are a LOT of Paperpile entries in my library that say “View PDF” and yet the PDF is not available (I get the error: “Something went wrong, could not open file” and none of the related troubleshooting for that message fixes my problem).
Is there any way to recover from this situation? If I have an endnote library with the PDFs can I somehow reconnect them or bulk-upload them and have them match to the right references? According to the PP help guide, “if a PDF matches up exactly with an existing item in your library, Paperpile will automatically attach the PDF to that item instead of adding a duplicate entry.” but I don’t know if that would work in my situation.
If not, can I bulk remove all the broken PDF links in Paperpile so I don’t have to go through this procedure: "click the “Paperclip” icon to view the attachment for a given item, then click the “Remove” link beneath the filename. "
thankfully I didn’t have any PDF annotations so if I need to re-fetch PDFs I can probably get many of them freshly. But many came via email, etc. so it’d be nice to restore a lot of them at once somehow.
I’ve been using PP for years now without really ever looking at the main app interface, just using it from within Google Docs. My admin figured out how to import my plain-text notes from endnote into my paperpile library, so that’s great. I finally had time to poke into the PDF storage and see what’s up with it. Sometimes people in my lab share Google Drive folders with me and then transfer ownership to me in bulk so I end up with random strays and I think that might be what confused me in this case, I had several Paperpile folders “owned by me”.
Overall, it’s not a crisis, it’s just I wanted to start using PP as a true reference management tool for PDFs and my text notes so I’d like to whip things into shape if possible!
I’m sure it was fundamentally my fault that things got mucked up and they are mostly old references so it’s ok if the PDF links are broken; honestly finding/removing broken links ‘would be nice’ but is definitely not as urgent as most of what you must be working on.