In my research, I make use of a lot of photographs of documents, and Scrivener’s facility to show the documents under the Research category, whilst typing in text in another pane is brilliant. However, if I import all my documents into the Scrivener files for each project, I am going to end up filling my hard disk very quickly. Is there a way to add files to the “Research” folder (I am still not up on scrivener notation, but hopefully this will be clear), whilst leaving the file in its original location and not making a duplicate inside the .scriv file, which would just contain a link to the correct location on the hard disk?
An example: I am about to write something based on 250 documents, and have JPG files of each. I imported them, and the scriv file was over 1GB. At that rate, my storage space would be exhausted quickly, not to mention the time it takes to import.
Obviously the scriv files would no longer be so portable, but that is a price I could live with.
No, anything in the binder is part of the project itself. However, you could instead add your files to the project references - anything in the references pane in the inspector is not imported.
Also, remember that you can just drag files from the Finder onto the header bar of an editor in Scrivener, so you can view files that haven’t been imported.
Thanks. I think this is what I wanted, though it would have been nice to be able to have references in folders or to be able to annotate them, as one can with things in the binder. But I guess that ones where annotations are needed can be moved into the binder for that. The other useful feature is that having inserted dragged a file into the document or project references, you can drag the item from the document or project references pane into the header of the window and view it. That is just what I wanted.
Icing on the cake: if you include a batch of files in the project references, is there a way easily to move a batch of them into the references for a specific document within the project? Or to move several at a time into the binder? Surprisingly, it seems possible to highlight them only one at a time.