Is it feasible to have one Tropy project (or tpy file) for all research, the same way one might have one Zotero library throughout their career?
Working in the humanities, I don’t want to have to segment my annotations by project — if I return to an archive years later, I’d like to see what I wrote when I first came across a document. My Zotero and Obsidian vault are designed for this kind of recursive, long-term use. I store archival files by archive and internal call number (so I can always retrieve them), and I’d like to use Tropy to navigate this database with tags and metadata.
Would Tropy be capable of handling a system like this, taking in an ever-growing number of photos? Or would I need to separate Tropy projects somehow, say, by archive?
Absolutely. Tropy uses different levels of granularity (project, list, item) but purposely leaves it up to decide how they should correspond to your research.
Combining several ‘projects’ into a single Tropy project allows you to share tags and other details such as values used for auto-completion to be shared. Whether that’s beneficial probably depends on the nature of your projects: how related they are in subject matter and also the number of photos.
As projects grow in size there are some potential issues to keep in mind. A Tropy project file is a SQLite database. In practice there should be no practical limit to the number of photos you can store in such a file, however, some parts of the UI are not optimized for large numbers of photos so there can be potentially performance issues with large project files. To get an idea whether or not that’s something to worry about, I’d say that if you expect to deal with tens of thousands of photos you’re probably fine. If it’s more like hundreds of thousands then it may become a factor of concern.
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I also prefer to work like this and I do the same in Mendeley, in Obsidian and I have also done it with Tropy. It works well.