Hi- So I am a research assistant and I am stressed because I made a bad mistake- I uploaded all photos to Tropy and categorized them with metadata etc, but then, before I shared the project with the supervisor, I had deleted all the photos off my computer (I thought they were loaded on to Tropy). So obviously when I shared it I got the “photo not found” and “!”. The good news is that I’ve re-downloaded all the photos, and if I right click “consolidate photo” and then search for the photo number, I can click it and it “re-attaches” that photo to it. The bad news is that there are thousands and thousands of photos and it will take me so long to do this manually. And even though I saw that it will prompt me to “auto-consolidate”, this hasn’t happened. Is there a way to trigger this or a way to consolidate them faster?
First off, is this an advanced or a standard project? In a standard project Tropy will make a copy of each photo during import; with advanced projects Tropy will instead use the file as is. I assume you’ve been using an advanced project.
If you still have all the original photos the easiest way to fix this is to restore them in exactly the same location from which you originally imported them. Tropy links each record to a file path on your disk; if you restore the files with the original path, the links will just work again. If you can’t restore the files at the same path, it means that the paths stored in your project need to be changed to reflect the new path of the files on your disk – this is called consolidation in Tropy. How easy or difficult this is depends on how the paths have changed. To figure this out, the best way forward is to compare the old and new path of your photos. To do this, please make a note of the full path, on your computer, to any of the photos (A); then find the record of the same photo in Tropy and make a note of where Tropy expects the file to be (B). Please post the two paths here – assuming that you moved the files in a uniform way (otherwise we’d have to repeat the process for each batch of files where the path has changed in a different way).