I’ve been trying to use Tropy across my PC and windows laptop. At first, the sync through OneDrive was fine. Then yesterday, my laptop did not load the changes I made on my PC earlier. Today, my PC no longer has those changes either. The main issue now, is that when I open Tropy I get an SQL error and it cannot open my project. However, I can open my project by locating the Tropy file in my documents folder named projectDesktop. When I open Tropy on its own, and I am prompted to select my project, the file explorer does not show that folder, only a file named project that can’t be opened.
It’s possible to put a project into a shared folder which you access from multiple devices, but you need to be careful with this kind of setup. Syncing the photos is usually no problem, because Tropy never changes the original files, so there are never any sync conflicts. But the project.tpy file is a SQLite database file which Tropy will write to as you make changes to your project. When using cloud syncing this means that you need to make sure that the file is fully synced before you open it in Tropy. And while it is open in Tropy, you cannot make changes to it on another device. If the file is synced/changed from outside while it is open in Tropy it’s possible for the file to get damaged.
When you open Tropy it will try to open the most recent project. If this doesn’t work it just shows you the list of recent projects it knows about. You can also open any other project by selecting File -> Open from the menu, which will open a file picker.
Thanks for the info! One thing I’m still running into is every time I open Tropy on my laptop, I get a notification from OneDrive about a tropy-wal file being deleted. Is this an issue?
It’s potentially an issue, yes.
For context, we enable WAL in standard project types automatically, because this has performance benefits at the cost of the extra -wal file (this is not enabled in advanced projects). Unfortunately, for cloud-based syncing it is not ideal to have to account for this extra file, especially because it is meant to be used only by the local process. In the future, we’ll probably just disable WAL for standard projects again because of this.
Meanwhile, it’s probably best to configure your cloud-sync service to ignore the -wal file entirely. I’m not using OneDrive myself and a quick search indicates that this might be not straightforward, but not to sync the file at all would be my recommendation.
In general, the -wal file is a temporary file that Tropy creates while you have the project open. You never want OneDrive to change that file while Tropy is open. When you close Tropy the file will either be removed, or it will remain on the file system but be completely empty (in fact, I suspect that this is why OneDrive keeps reporting that the file was deleted).
If Tropy crashes the -wal file might stick around with valuable content, which will be used on restart to recover from the crash. All this is to say that normally you don’t want this file to be synced to the cloud at all. The only case where you would want that is if Tropy crashed and you wanted to open the project and recover the temporary data on a different device than where the crash happened.