Can Tropy and Devonthink play together?

1

Hello, I am just starting to use Tropy, it looks like exactly the program that I have been looking for to organize my research images. I have been using Devonthink for a number of years to organize my research notes, but I’ve never liked its image interface… in any case it seems that no one has asked about Tropy + Devonthink before on these forums so I’ll test the waters.

As really rough background, Devonthink is software that can hold any kind of file within its own database, or index files on your computer, leaving them in place but adding their content to its global search index. While I gather that it is possible to manually export notes I am wondering whether it would be possible in any way for Devonthink to index .tpy files in such a way that I could have the note content that I write in Tropy accessible to Devonthink.

For the moment it seems like the best possible way to get my content into Devonthink might be to do a manual export of a project to JSON-LD, and then have Devonthink index that file. Of course this would be pretty messy, and I would have to do it manually. I’m not holding my breath here but wondering whether there is any way for these two programs to talk to each other!

2

The .tpy file is a SQLite database file so it’s possible to access it contents via the CLI tool sqlite3 or even directly if Devonthink has includes a SQLite module. Tropy stores your notes using in a document model, using an internal schema, and also a plain-text version to make indexing easier. So it should definitely be possible to access all your notes’ contents if you can tell Devonthink to dump all the text when it indexes the file.

3

Thank you for your reply. I looked on the Devonthink forums and it seems unlikely that Devonthink will be able to index SQLite databases anytime soon. I hope it’s okay to leave the external link here so that others who may have this question in the future can find it.

In any case I will look into some manual ways to dump Tropy information to a plain text file as that seems like the best way of getting the content into Devonthink.

1 Like