Thread: home-reorg-2026 Depends on: downloads triage (home-cleanup-downloads)
#Goal
One canonical folder for research PDFs, linked to papers.db, with automated ingest and deduplication. No more PDFs scattered across Downloads, project trees, and email attachments.
#Phases
Phase 1 — Triage Downloads. Sweep ~/Downloads/ for PDFs. Separate research papers from receipts, manuals, and other documents. Research papers advance; the rest file to their governors.
Phase 2 — Canonical folder. Establish ~/Documents/Papers/ (or ~/lib/papers/) as the single root. Organize by first-author/year or flat with metadata in the DB. Move all known paper PDFs from project trees, Downloads, and email caches.
Phase 3 — Link papers.db. papers.db gets a local_path column pointing to the canonical copy. Bake script sources from the canonical folder. Queries resolve to the file on disk.
Phase 4 — Zotero bridge. Optional. If Zotero is in use, sync its storage with the canonical folder or point Zotero at it. Avoid two copies of the same PDF.
Phase 5 — WatchPaths ingest. LaunchAgent watches ~/Downloads/ for new PDFs matching research-paper heuristics (DOI in metadata, arxiv filename pattern). Moves to canonical folder, indexes in papers.db.
Phase 6 — Deduplication. Content-hash all PDFs in the canonical folder. Flag duplicates. Keep the best-quality copy (highest resolution, most pages, non-mobile render).
#Completion criteria
papers.db is the index, ~/Documents/Papers/ is the store, and new papers land there automatically. No research PDFs in ~/Downloads/ older than one day.
Strategy 37 — 37 — Papers/PDF library consolidation — 2026 — Zachary F. Mainen / HAAK