Hi there – I’m new to Tropy and just learning the ropes.
It looks to me like Tropy imports images at full resolution while leaving the originals intact. Am I right in thinking that as a result, organizing my images in Tropy is going to take about double the disk space as the images themselves?
(I’m dealing with some pretty big image archives and so I need to plan some strategies for managing hard drive space and back-up locations.)
Thanks!
Good question! Generally, this depends on a number factors. Most importantly, with the standard project type, each imported photo is copied into the project’s asset folder. If you keep the original file around for other reasons this already means that you have two copies on disk. If you want to keep using the original image files (e.g., because other applications need access to them) you can instead use an advanced project. This will not make a copy of your images on import, but instead use the file at its original location (the downside is that if you later move the file or want to access the project from another device you’ll likely have to consolidate the file for Tropy to find it again).
Apart from this distinction, Tropy will generally try to use the original file as is. Tropy’s image viewer uses WebGL for rendering and therefore Tropy will generate full-size versions for formats which can’t be used as WebGL textures natively. This is typically similar to image formats supported by browsers on the web, that is, for JPEG, PNG, WebP etc. Tropy will use the original. For TIFF, PDF, and other formats, Tropy will create a full-size copy in the image cache. Variants in the cache are necessary for viewing the items in Tropy, but they can be re-generated, so if you don’t use a project for some time it’s safe to clear the project’s image cache if you’re concerned about using up too much space (Tropy will regularly delete old caches if a project hasn’t been opened in a long time as well).
If you have a project with a lot of big images, it might be worth converting them to a different format before you import them. For example, if you have images and they’re all saved in PDFs it absolutely makes sense to extract the images first and only then import them into Tropy. This way you can then remove the original PDF and keep only the images.
Thanks so much for these very helpful replies!