Managing a large collection of PDF files

Question

I have a large collection of PDF files and am looking forward to an application that:

• Is easy to install (Available in repositories)
• Is portable (migration to other computer running linux or windows should be easy)
• Allows annotating and tagging/ categorizing the PDFs
• Allows searching the text of PDFs, metadata, annotations, tags, etc.
• Allows batch import of PDFs
• Also allows importing PDFs without requiring to copy the physical files
• Is preferably open-source
• Allows backing up of library on-line

Any suggestions? Please mention if your suggestion does not have any features mentioned above.

Thanks!

Solution

Calibre and Mendeley would come to mind. Nr. 1 is in the official repositories, Nr. 2 available as a .deb package. Both are cross-platform and fulfill most of your requirements.

Another viable option might be Zotero. Here's a comparison to Mendeley.

Comments

[nanofarad]

Being portable is not very easy as Windows programs != Linux programs. You can try to find one that is available for both systems and can share a library.

[nanofarad]

Cross distro is a bit easier if you use a tar.gz installation archive. It will be harder to Windows.

[deshmukh]

Very impressed with Zotero. Does the job very well.

[Glutanimate]

Indeed, it does! I just love its integration with Chrome and LibreOffice.