"Consolidate photo library" Issue

Troubleshooting
1

Hi all,

I’m using Tropy to help a friend organize their research, after having used it for my own projects in the past. They used a file structure where each item was in it’s own folder, and things are generally nested within multiple folders. I used the “advance” option with the hope of having a “portable” tropy instance that I could pass off to my friend on an external drive. I imported the images folder by folder, so there’s no one folder containing all the image files.

I moved the project and image folders to the external drive, and tested opening the project. As expected, I needed to consolidate all the images, so I tried using the File > Consolidate Photo Library feature. This kind of worked, but there were two issues:

  1. It only worked for about 70% of the items in my project; I had to finish the consolidation item-by-item manually.
  2. For items that were consolidated “automatically”, they appear and work perfectly fine but there’s still an error icon next to each photo file name.

I’m wondering if I might have not given the initial consolidation enough time to work, as manually consolidating images has a bit of a lag for me. Anyway, I wanted to share this issue with the team.

I’m also wondering if there’s a better way to do this (have a portable tropy project that moves from one device to another). I saw some older forum posts about relative file paths, but I’m running 1.16.2 and it doesn’t seem to have options beyond the “Advanced” option when I set up a new project. Please let me know!

Thank you,

Tatiana

2

The advanced project stores all references to the files you import either using absolute paths or relative to the project file itself. Absolute paths are useful if you keep the files in different locations and you want to be able to move the project file independent of them. Relative paths are useful if you want to move the project file and all the photos together.

In your case, you definitely want to use relative paths. If you set up the project the right way there should be no need to update the paths: if you open the project on a new device you may still see a ‘consolidating…’ message, but in this case it should only indicate that Tropy is creating missing thumbnails.

To set up the project, just create an advanced project. Then, before importing any items, open the project preferences and there set the project to use relative paths. Then close the project. Make sure the project is in the right location relative to your photos (e.g. at the root of the nested folder structure). Then open the project and import the photos. At this point you should be able to move the project file and the photos together to and external drive. And open it from any device. Like I said above, the first time you open the project on a new device, Tropy will consolidate the items by itself, it should find all the files and create thumbnails as necessary.