How to Copy Items Between Scrivener Projects

You may have written some scenes or chapters in a project and decided not to use them, but realize that they might fit in your next project. Or you may be working on a novel and decide that you want to spin part of it off as a separate project. Or you may have a Scrivener project that contains two or three books of a series you’ve written and want each of them to be in their own project.

You can copy any of these items to another Scrivener project quickly and easily. Here’s how.

What you can copy between projects

You may have chapters or scenes that you’ve written in one project that you decided not to use, but later realize that they would be useful in a new project. You could, of course, just copy and paste the text, but if you do so, you lose things such as synopses, notes, snapshots, and more.

Scrivener can copy items between projects, retaining all the relevant information about files and folders. When you copy using the two methods below, Scrivener retains the following:

• The Title & Synopsis of each file and folder
• The main text content or media content (such as images)
• Styles within the text, as long as the target project has styles with the same name
• Notes
• Bookmarks (if the files you copy include internal links between documents, cross-references are preserved only if target documents are copied)
• Custom Metadata (if the target project also contains the same fields)
• Custom icons (if the icon is not available to the target project, you may not see it, but it will be visible once the icon is present)
• Snapshots
• Section types (if a section type of the same name is available in the target project)
• Document targets
• Whether the document should be included in compile

There are two ways to copy items between projects. For each of these methods, you must open both the project you are copying from and the project you want to copy items to.

Drag and drop to copy items between projects

You can drag items from one Scrivener project to another. Click to select one or more items – file, folder, or multiple items – and drag them to the location where you want them in the other project. If you’re dragging to a new project, you can drop the items in the top-level Draft or Manuscript folder. If you drop items on the empty space at the bottom of the Binder, the dragged items appear in that location. You can then move the items where you want. Note that you cannot drop any items that contain media files – images or videos – to the top-level folder in the Binder.

Note that you cannot drag the Research folder, or any other folder that contains media files, into the top-level folder of the Binder. You can, however, drag text files with images that you have inserted into them.

Copy items between projects using the Documents menu

If you select an item in the Binder of one project, you can choose Documents > Copy to Project. Scrivener recognizes other open projects – you can have more than two projects open – and a submenu lets you choose where to place the item you want to copy. If you want to copy items from the top section of the Binder, choose the Draft or Manuscript folder as the target. If you want to copy Character or Settings sheets, select one of them, and choose the appropriate folder in the second project. As you can see, the submenu shows you the full structure of your Binder:

On Mac, after the first time you use Copy to Project, Scrivener displays Copy to Project Name Again, so you can easily continue copying other items. There is a keyboard shortcut available, Command-Option-Shift-C, so you can copy multiple items without having to use the menu each time. When you use this shortcut, Scrivener copies each item to the same location as the first one.

Duplicate projects

Another option can be useful if you have multiple books in a series in a single project. You can duplicate that project and delete everything that you don’t want to keep in the duplicates.

For example, if you have a trilogy in a Scrivener project, duplicate it twice. On Mac, find the project in the Finder, right-click, and choose Duplicate. On Windows, in the File Explorer, copy the project, then paste it twice. Both operating systems add the word copy and the end of the project names, and you can rename the new projects.

You could name the original project Book 1 and the two duplicates Book 2 and Book 3, or name them with the appropriate titles.

In each project, delete the sections that don’t fit with the new, individual projects. In the project entitled Book 1, delete the folders that contain Book 2 and Book 3, and so on. This will remove all of your writing, but it will not remove your characters, settings, notes, and research. You may want to keep these elements, because if you have written a trilogy, this information may be appropriate for all three books. If not, you can go through the appropriate folders in the Binder to see what you want to keep or delete.