Finally the software I’ve been waiting for has been invented! But I’ve been working for some time with 30,000 archival research photos, taken in the last two years, which I organize using Apple Photos and store in the cloud. Can I expect to be able to import all of them into Tropy?
Yes! (But please be careful.)
We fully appreciate that there is a need to support large research projects. I’ve been routinely using a project with 10k photos, but we have not run tests with up to 30k photos yet, so please bear with us in case there are issues, because this is new territory for us as well. My main concern with larger projects is simply that some actions may require optimizations at the database level that we’re simply not aware of at the moment (because they’re fast enough with smaller data sets). If you run into any issues, please do let us know and we’ll do our best to address them.
Having Tropy access the photos directly from Apple Photos is something that we want to support (so that you don’t have to duplicate all the photos) but it’s not straightforward because Apple Photos does not invite this kind of interoperability. Currently, I think the best way to import the photos directly (i.e., without copying them first) is via Tropy’s import dialog (the plus button) and selecting the ‘Media’ panel which gives you access to the photos. However, I have not looked at how you would access photos which Apple stores on the cloud. Please stay tuned as we work out the details for this kind of workflow!
Hey, sorry to pick up an old thread, but I’m working with a similar situation and following your suggestion above doesn’t actually work. When I hit the + button and go to the Media panel to Photos, I’m told to open up Photos itself to see the lists of Photos. Which doesn’t help me since there’s no drag & drop feature with Apple Photos. As of now I’m stuck dragging my photos into folders that I’m just throwing into a separate folder and it’s unworkable. Would really appreciate your help! Thanks – and apologies if this has been answered elsewhere (my cursory search suggested this might be the best place to follow up).
Which version of macOS are you using? I am on 10.13.5 (High Sierra) and I can pick the photos directly from the media tab in the file selector.
There is another way to import the photos directly out of the Photos.app library. Open Finder and select your Photos Library (the default library is in your ‘Pictures’ folder). Right click on the library and select ‘Show package contents’: this will open the library in the Finder window. There you can look in the ‘Masters’ folder where all your originals are stored. You can drag and drop the photos from there into Tropy; Tropy will only ever read the files, so it will not interfere with Photos.app.