Folder name change prompts consolidation of entire library

inukshuk · February 19, 2021, 9:26am

The consolidation takes a long time, because it involves searching for and then analyzing each individual photo. For over 10,000 files that’s definitely not a practical approach especially if you know exactly that only a folder was moved or renamed.

There’s currently no UI for this, but it’s quite easy to update all paths in the project with a single command that takes less than a second, if they’ve changed in a uniform way. You can do this with the sqlite3 tool which should be pre-installed your MacBook. Here are some steps you can take. If you need more help, please let us know the paths where Tropy thinks your files are and the paths where they actually are.

Before you start, please make a backup copy of your project file in case something goes wrong!
Open Terminal.app and cd into the directory of your project file. For example, if your project file is in the Documents folder:
```
$ cd Documents
```
Open the project file with the sqlite3 command. For example, if your project file is called ‘project.tpy’:
```
$ sqlite3 project.tpy
```
Now you should not be at the command prompt anymore, but at the SQLite prompt (the prompt is typically a > instead of the $). To test that you’ve opened the project file, let’s print out a list of all the photos in the project:
```
> select path from photos order by path;
```
This should print all 10k photos. You can shorten this and print only the first 10 like this:
```
> select path from photos order by path limit 10;
```
If this looks in order, you’re ready to update the paths. For this we’ll use a single update command that replaces all the paths in one go. For example, if your photos used to be nested under a folder /Volumes/OLD/photos/... and that path has changed to /Volumes/NEW/photos/..., then you would update your paths like this:
```
> update photos set path = replace(path, '/Volumes/OLD/', '/Volumes/NEW/');
```
Now print out the list of paths again to check that the paths have been updated correctly.
If everything looks good, close sqlite3 by typing .exit or by pressing Ctrl+D and close the Terminal. Open the updated project in Tropy and test if it finds the photos. To test this, I would select a handful of photos, open them in the viewer, and maybe right-click on a photo in the photo panel and select ‘Show Original Photo’: this should open the respective folder in Finder with the photo selected.