Photo file name not adjusted after consolidation

I had to change the file name of a photo I have imported earlier into Tropy.

Unfortunately, I cannot do this from within Tropy (a feature that I would love to see in a future release). Therefore, I changed the file name in Windows Explorer first and consolidated that photo in Tropy afterwards.

This kind of works, but Tropy still shows the old file name. Only when I hover over or click the file name I can see that Tropy knows the new file name. This looks like a bug?

Just to be sure, you’re saying that the Filename field does not update, not the title (which is usually derived from the original file name during import but which should not automatically update)? We’ll take a look at this.

Yes, I am talking about the filename, not the title.

Have a look at the following example: After this photo was added to the project, I extended the filename via Windows Explorer with the “pengiuns_” prefix and consolidated the picture. As we can tell from the link, Tropy knows about the new filename – but the displayed filename is not updated.

The filename behaves strangely in another aspect as well: In the following example I have imported the photo “Chrysanthemum.jpg” in my project. Tropy still displayes the filename as “Chrysanthemum.jpg” – although the file in the assets folder has a completely different name (probably auto-generated on import).

So generally speaking the displayed filename seems to be set once and may differ from the real filename in various situations.

Yes, the second example is as expected, because the standard project renames the files it stores. After all, it’s possible that you import many files with the same name; also we don’t want to store multiple copies of identical files even when they are imported with different names. But we still want to remember the original file name, so that we can use it when you export the photo. This way, exporting works the same way whether it’s a standard or advanced project.

This is probably the reason why the name is not updated when you consolidate the file in an advanced project. In advanced projects, consolidation is not required in the same sense as with advanced projects, but the same code branches still apply there. So this is likely a case where we need to alter the behevior slightly based on the project type: for advanced projects, the name should be updated if it changes on disk, for standard projects it should not update because we want to retain the original file name.

Now I understand how it works, but I find it confusing.

Maybe the label should not read “File” but “Original File Name” or “Export File Name” then?