Hi, back asking more questions!
The next one is: is it possible to merge two projects, and how to do that?
It is quite crucial at this step of my database construction to know whether this is possible or not, because it would determine how to organize the next bunch of pictures I have.
Thanks in advance
Merging projects is not supported yet.
One of our priorities this fall will be to add more import options; this will enable us to copy/paste items between projects (among other things), that is, you will be able to select any number of items (or all items) of project A and then open project B to paste all the items there.
Any updates on the ability to merge?
I’m curious because I am exploring using Tropy as a default program for analyzing West African manuscripts. One option to make “annotations/transcripts” more portable is follow the work of linguists that via ELAN choose to do individual annotations/transcripts on single audio/video files.
In this workflow and archiving practice, linguists create a single ELAN project file for each and every audio/video file that they are annotating or working on. There is some ability to search across ELAN project files via some fancy search option where you select all the ELAN project files of interest.
In terms of Tropy, the ability to have a single project file per manuscript/archival document etc would facilitate sharing, archiving and analyzing individual sources, but at the expense of stepping back and moving easily across an entire “collection” etc., if there’s no way to merge.
Any insights or best practices that people have adopted or that you all have on your mind?
EDIT: Just realized this thread was from Sep 13, 2018 and not September 2013 so I’m assuming there’s no update, but curious how Tropy is thinking about this since the path taken by linguists and the Max Planck Institute is totally different.
As mentioned above, we’re currently working on improved import options: most importantly, importing Tropy’s JSON-LD format. This will allow you to copy/paste any number of items (plus metadata, notes, etc.) between individual Tropy projects (you could also select all items for export or copy/paste, effectively copying an entire project).
Hi there–I’m curious if there’s been any movement on support for merging Tropy projects, or moving items between Tropy projects. Thank you!
Yes! You can copy & paste items between projects (an easy way to do this is to open both projects in two windows).
To copy items to a project on another device, the best way is to use the archive plugin, which lets you exported selected items into a zip archive: if you copy and unpack the zip file to a different device you can then import the included json file.
Hi, is it possible to search across multiple projects? So far, I have used a “project” to corral documents from a region - mostly out of fear that if I put all my documents in one project, it might be too big and crash. (So, side question: is there a size limit to projects?)
It’s not possible to search across multiple projects. The best thing you can do is open both projects in two windows and run the same search in both windows.
There’s no direct way to merge two projects, however, it should be very easy to do in most cases by copying all the items from one project into the other. For example, just open both projects side by side, select a number of items (or even all items) in the one project, copy them, then paste them into the other one.
If you use lists and also want to merge the list structures it’s a little more complicated. In this case, you first need to create the desired list structure in the target project. When you actually copy the items, I suggest to copy/paste them list by list – if you paste items in a project they will be automatically added to the currently selected list, therefore it should be relatively easy to copy all the items this way if you have a simple list structure and if you don’t have any items which are in several lists. For more complex list structures it’s probably best to first copy/paste all items without the lists and then re-create the lists (and add items to them) in the target project.
Apologies for missing the side question: there’s no hard limit on the number of photos you can import into a project. We have seen projects with over 500k photos. However, not all aspects of Tropy are optimized for such large projects yet so, depending on your hardware, there are definitely project sizes which may impact the overall responsiveness of the UI (which we’re hoping to improve!).
As a general guideline I would say that if your project covers “thousands” of photos there should be no concern at all. If it covers “tens of thousands” I’d say that it starts to make sense to thoroughly consider questions regarding how best to organize everything (i.e., one or more project files; storing all photos in one place or across several locations, for example external drives etc.). And finally, if it’s “hundreds of thousands” or more these question become even more important.