Finding all my annotated PDFs amongst the clutter
December 12, 2013 6:05 AM   Subscribe

I have a lot of PDFs and some of them contain my notes and annotations. How can I single out the annotated files without opening them all, one by one?

Since I bought my first iPad PDFs have become an essential source for research. Problem is, I wasn't particularly organised as I went along. I use Dropbox, my PC, and an iPad app called 'PDF Expert' to store and access my PDFs.

Now a lot of the PDFs I have read and left notes on, are intermingled with those that I have never read, or just scanned over briefly. I have managed to sort through and organise a lot of them, but I am worried I am missing the odd highlighted sentence or typed note amongst the clutter.

I need a program or a method for PC that can find all PDFs with annotations, and let me see where they are located and move them to a single location.

I use Zotero for citations, but as a PDF library it leaves a lot to be desired. Mendeley looks more useful to organise as I go along, but it doesn't seem to have an option to single out those documents with notes already in them.
posted by bollockovnikov to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
I haven't used this, but I've seen Papers recommended for organizing pdfs.
posted by toddje at 6:42 AM on December 12, 2013


Just a guess, and not a solution to the location problem, but could you look at which PDFs have a Date Created different from their Date Modified? Maybe that would be a good indicator that you saved changes like annotations to the file.
posted by rustcellar at 11:24 AM on December 12, 2013


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