PDF export - images as black boxes

Hello everyone, I have a question concerning the export to PDF. When I do the export of my tropy list including the images, many (not all) of them appear as black boxes. This seems to happen randomly, as it sometimes occurs to a selected data set, but not when exporting the entire list and vice versa. I would be happy if you could help me. Thank you!!

It sounds like this could be an error where individual images are not loaded (or are not loaded in time) during the export process. Can you tell us what operating system version you’re using? The print/pdf stacks work differently on each platform.

If you notice additional details it could help us figure this out. For example, if it the same photo always fails, I would guess that there’s an issue loading that specific photo. If it happens randomly, as you say above, and given photo sometimes works and sometimes does not I would guess that it’s a timing issue. A timing issue should be more likely to happen if you’re exporting a larger set; less so if exporting a smaller set or even just a single photo.

If it’s down to timing, there is currently an arbitrary timeout (two seconds) – if all images have not reported as being loaded the PDF conversion will continue. It’s possible that this is just too short in your case. Again, this is more likely to happen if you export lots of photos together or if the photos are very big, but maybe we just allow for a little more time there.

If the images are big it would also help to make sure you have the option ‘Optimize photo size and quality’ enabled in the preferences.

Tropy is amazing. But it would really be necessary to develop the PDF export options: possibility to export several images per page; no more bugs when exporting a PDF, etc. Is there any progress on this point?

What kind of printing modes with several images per page would you like to see? Do you mean something like one item per page, with all photos in the item being shown (if possible). Which metadata, if any, would would you want to see on the page?

We have always planned to include some kind of item/per page mode but we have not seen good use cases yet to help us figure out exactly what this should entail.

Of course the other way to get multiple photos on the same page is via the OS-level print dialog, which should also allow you to save as PDF.

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For example, for my research, I’d need to export PDFs from Tropy with 4 images per page, and all the metadata. Ideally, I’d like to be able to choose how many images per sheet I want when exporting in Pdf format (and that the text remains sufficiently legible). But I don’t know how complicated that is.
This would be very useful for historians to show a selection of images simply, and reduce the number of pages of the Pdf.

When you say four images per page, including all metadata for each image, how is that different from using the current layout and selecting four pages per sheet in the print dialog?

the text becomes illegible.

Reviving cause I was curious if there were any updates on this feature.

As someone trying to use Tropy to catalog science samples, showing one item per page with its title and image would be incredibly helpful to print group catalogs or lists so there are not several pages per item.

Just to clarify, you’d be interested in printing out only the first photo of an item (i.e., one item per page). And you’d like to include only the title field and no other metadata?

Hi,

Yes, the more detailed printout is helpful for teaching purposes, but to show an overview of the records to skim through- it would be helpful to be able to print a list of just one of the images and the title.

I have just found this topic here. I have experienced this problem several times (always latest Tropy version, in an updated Windows 10 environment).

Whenever it happens, I enter the Project View, then use the Consolidate command (either just the selected items, or the whole project), and export again. Usually, the PDF is exported correctly after consolidating.

I can’t figure out a sequence of steps to reproduce this problem, but there is another ‘glitch’ that could be somehow related, it happens in the Item View:

  1. open an item with several photos in Item View
  2. in any photo, create one or more selections
  3. in the Photos Pane, whenever I click or navigate directly to a selection, without navigating to its parent photo, an exclamation mark appears next do this photo.

What happens in step 3 does not compromise the usability, as clicking back in the photo makes it appear correctly (even with the exclamation mark). Since it bothers me seeing a “false flag” in the interface, I right click it and then click ‘consolidate photo’, and the exclamation mark disappears.