macOS Documents Move After Opening

I have noticed that after opening one document the next time I open a document it is moved from the directory where I have it to the directory of the document I previously had open.

If it makes any difference I am opening documents in my MarginNote3 directory in iCloud. It is frustrating because I panic and have to go find the document in Finder and move it back to where I want it rather than where MarginNote puts it.

Has anyone else seen this behavior and is there anything that can be done about it?

Thanks!

Hello

I am sorry that I am unable to understand what you mean here. Do you mean that MarginNote will automatically move the document into its folder? I wasn't able to replicate this with my Mac or iPhone. Can you please give me a more detailed description of what you mean? It would be better if you could explain it with a screenshot or a screen recording.

If you want to access files that you don't want to move to MarginNote, you can use the method described in this link. Sorry that it is a little complicated.

https://forum.marginnote.com/t/space-lacking-symbolic-hard-link-to-marginnote-library-liberate-your-storage/1261

Kind Regards,
MarginNote-Sushi
Support Team

These are files I do want to use with MarginNote but they keep moving.

I am relatively new to using MarginNote so there is a good chance that I am doing something that I shouldn’t which is causing this issue.

As you can see in the above image I have a fee schedule from a client in the selected directory. By default I have been keeping one file in the root directory open because I keep coming back to read it and make notes. But when I open the fee schedule the following happens:

As you can see the PDF moves from where it was to the same directory as the file I have been keeping open.

This is where I am stuck because I had assumed this was something that happened when I would first open up a PDF but it keeps happening.

Hello

Oh yeah, that's much clearer. I now understand what you mean.

It does make a difference in that you opened it with finder instead of using MarginNote's default file browser. The problem here is that whenever you open a document using MarginNote, it will try to move it to its folder in the iCloud. In this case, the document is already in MarginNote's folder in iCloud, but MarginNote does not know and tried to move it to the root folder.

I have noted this issue and reported it to the development team. However, I don't know whether and when if it could get fixed. In the meantime, you may have to open documents in the MarginNote's folder.

Kind Regards,
MarginNote-Sushi
Support Team

I was just having this problem too and this is the work around I came up with. I used Automator to create a new app that will take the file path to the pdf and via Applescript support in MarginNote3, it will search for the document by name to get the ID and then open it with the URL scheme. I saved this app as MarginNote3OpenByName.app and set that as the default pdf viewer in my Zotero settings. In Zotero I use zotfile to save the PDFs directly to the MarginNote iCloud folder.

Applescript to have Automator run as an application

on run {input, parameters}
	
	set {pdffile, theExtension} to {name, name extension} of (info for (POSIX path of input))
	if theExtension is not "" then set pdffile to text 1 thru -((count theExtension) + 2) of pdffile -- the name part
	
	#	display dialog pdffile
	tell application "MarginNote 3"
		set nbk to item 1 of (search notebook pdffile)
		set nbkurl to "marginnote3app://notebook/" & id of nbk
		do shell script "open " & nbkurl
	end tell
	
	
	return input
end run