Error SQLITE_CANTOPEN: unable to open database file

Hi,
I know this has been discussed several times in the forum, but I didn’t find a solution to my case.
I get the SQLITE_CANTOPEN: unable to open database file when trying to open a .tpy file stored on an external hard drive (together with the image files). I also updated to macOS 13.6 recently. Please let me know if you need more information.
Thanks in advance for your help

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P.S. if I move the file to my hard drive I can open it (with the wrong image paths of course)

Can you elaborate on how you’re opening the file?

sorry if that wasn’t clear. I can open the file when I copy it to my mac HD. But the file is stored on an external disk, where also the image files are. If I copy it to my macbook I don’t get the error, but I can’t use the file either, because the images are on the external drive. Does that answer your question?

by the way, this problem occurs with all .tpy files I have stored on the external disk.

That’s odd. If for some reason Tropy didn’t have write access to the external drive it should at least open the file in read-only mode. And if it had no read access it would fail with a permission denied error. (Though it’s possible that you would see the can’t open error if any if there’s no read access to the parent directory).

How are you trying to open the file? Via the menu and the OS file picker? Or by dragging and dropping the file from Finder?

In either case, can you check the log file after you get the error? The log file should contain the full path to the .tpy file that Tropy was trying to open. Please check if that path looks like the correct path. If open the Terminal app you can use the following commands (with the full path to the file) to check the file permissions to see if there’s anything that could point to a permission-related reason:

ls -l /your/tpy/file
xatttr /your/tpy/file

Hi! Sorry I completely lost track of this. Thanks for your reply.
I find this in the .log file (see below) when searching for the file name (“Old Masters”). What it strange, I had only moved the file to Desktop to test if the file itself was damaged after the error. The path on the external storage seems correct.

{“level”:40,“time”:1702116629580,“type”:“renderer”,“name”:“project”,“stack”:“Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, stat ‘/Users/ertlt/Desktop/Old Masters.tpy’”,“msg”:“failed to stat project file ‘/Users/ertlt/Desktop/Old Masters.tpy’”}
{“level”:30,“time”:1702116629580,“type”:“renderer”,“name”:“project”,“mode”:“r”,“msg”:“open db /Volumes/ScanDisk/Storage/Photos Kunstgeschichte/Old Masters.tpy”}

OK if I understand this correctly, you temporarily moved the project to your Desktop and opened it there to test something and then you removed the copy again. Tropy keeps a list of recently opened files to make it easier to find previously opened projects. In the new project window this list is displayed, but to make it more useful than just showing the file names Tropy will access each project and display some information about it (like project name, number of items in the project and so forth). If a file’s not there anymore there will be an error in the log file and the project will be marked as missing in the list. Since you removed the copy and don’t really need to opened it again you can just remove it from the list of recent projects. It’s also no big deal to leave it there and ignore the error in the log file.

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Yes, but this wasn’t the initial problem. The problem is with the same file on the external drive, i keep getting the SQLITE_CANTOPEN: unable to open database file error when trying to open it. Also, this was the case before I had moved the file to desktop and back (that was actually the reason why I had moved it, to test if it showed the same error, which it didn’t).

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I see. So you have a project file that Tropy opens fine when it’s on your Desktop. But if you try to open the same file from an external drive it results in the can’t open error?

This has got to be a permissions issue. Are there any extended attributes shown when you use xattr on the file (on the external drive)? Does it make a difference if you give Tropy the ‘Full Disk Access’ permission (under ‘Privacy & Security’ in the system preferences)?

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“So you have a project file that Tropy opens fine when it’s on your Desktop. But if you try to open the same file from an external drive it results in the can’t open error?” Yes, that was the problem.

“Does it make a difference if you give Tropy the ‘Full Disk Access’ permission (under ‘Privacy & Security’ in the system preferences)?” Yes it does. This perfectly solved the issue. Thank you!