For example if I add a newer version of a photo and don’t want to type it all again or copy/paste one thing at a time. (If not, I guess this could be a feature request.)
Have you looked at merging items? There are some slight differences regarding the order (i.e., merging item A into B or B into A, especially if merging more than two items) but basically you can just drag one item onto another to merge them (or select multiple items and use the context menu). If you’re experimenting this this, also note that you can undo the merge.
Other than merging, you can also use bulk editing to ‘copy’ metadata: if you select multiple items the fields will show the values of the first item of your selection; if you then tab through the fields and press Enter that value will be written to all the selected items (that’s useful if you want to copy only some fields, but not others).
Thanks.
The 2nd method is what I’ve done. Haven’t tried merging but I will.
Merging items worked perfectly. Now I have 100 or more items with two identical images, one of which is a png, the other a jpg. Can anyone suggest a simple way to remove all the png files from the project (and from Tropy entirely) without having to do it one item at a time, hovering over “file” in the metadata to see which is png and which is jpg? (Since I can’t make the metadata pane wide enough to show the whole file name.)
Hmm, good question. I cannot think of a good way to achieve this in the UI but it would be relatively easy to do this directly in your project database (Tropy’s project files are SQLite database files). The only tricky part, really, would be getting the ids of all the photos you want to delete, but if, as you say, you know that you want to remove every PNG it would be very easy.
SQLite is pre-installed on macOS and is part of every Linux distribution to the best of my knowledge. I have little experience installing SQLite on Windows; I have recommended installing DB Browser for SQLite in the past and this has been well received. Anyway, if you want to try this, please make a backup copy of your .tpy file (just to be safe!), open the file in SQLite, and follow these steps:
> select id, path from photos;
# This should print the id and path of every photo in your project
> select id, path from photos where path like '%.png';
# This should print the id and path of every PNG in your project.
# If this works, we're set to go!
> insert into trash (id) select id from photos where path like '%.png';
# This puts all the PNGs into the trash. This is the only command here
# that actually modifies your project.
# Note that we select only the photo id here, not the path like we did earlier.
> select id from trash;
# This prints all the ids currently in the trash.
# This does not do anything, but you can use it
# to check that the photos are really in the trash.
At this point you can quite SQLite again; right now the photos are still there but Tropy should not show them anymore and the next time Tropy closes this project, it will completely remove those photos and all their metadata. So, basically, all you need to do is open the file in Tropy (be sure to open the file you modified and not the backup copy) and check if the PNGs are gone; if they are, close Tropy to see if there are any errors and you should be all good.
I can also run these commands for you if you want to send me your project file.
Thanks. That’s great info. I’ll go that route next time–this time I did it manually.
Would be nice to have the option to have file type displayed somewhere, especially as more are added to Tropy’s abilities.