Showing the path of imported files

Hi there! I just discovered this nifty tool, and I want to ask a complete newbie question.

I added a few images for my genealogy research to test, and read the following in the documentation:

When you import a photo, Tropy makes a thumbnail copy of the photo. The original photo remains in its original location on your hard drive. You have several options for adding photos to your project.

Is it possible to show the path in my hard drive to the documents/photos I’ve imported? Before finding this software, a lot of my organization relied on the use of folders, so having a way to view where the imported images were stored would be immensely helpful to fill out some of the metadata.

Thanks!

Yes! With the photo in question selected, find the photo info in the metadata panel: there should be line showing the photo’s file name. If you move the mouse over the file name, the full path should show up. Additionally, if you click on the file name it should open up in your system’s file manager (you can also right-click on the photo and select ‘Show original photo …’ to do this).

Thanks for the fast reply! Would it make sense to move this to feature requests? For transcribing, hovering over the info panel wouldn’t be as smooth, it would be really great if the folder itself was shown somewhere in the UI so my mouse is free!

Another question I have (maybe worth asking in a separate thread?) is how to export notes to markdown? I couldn’t find anything in the docs, except

You can export your notes in either HTML or Markdown. To change which format you wish to use, navigate to Preferences and scroll down to Export . Select either “Notes as HTML” or “Notes as Markdown.”

I’ve already set “Notes as Markdown” in my preferences, and added a test note to one of my photos. Right-clicking and exporting generates the json file, but I couldn’t find any markdown file with the note.

The markdown note should be included in the JSON (each note will have respective html/markdown fields depending on your preferences). We were considering adding ‘copy as markdown’ to the note context menu to make it easier to just grab the contents as markdown. I added that to the todo list for 1.8.1 or 1.8.2.

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That would be great!

@inukshuk if I may add a suggestion to this, it would be that the right click menu could also just export that note to a markdown file. The contents which you’re adding to the clipboard are the same, the only other thing needed is a filename, and save that with the .md extension. It might save me a few clicks down the line.

Something to complement this export for me would be if I could attach markdown notes from somewhere else in my hard drive so I can edit them outside of Tropy too.

Clipboard vs File (dialog) is an issue I thought about a lot regarding various plugins – right now you’d create two plugin instances, one for save to clipboard, one to save to file and you end up with two menu entries. This would be similar: I’m worried it could get out of hand, e.g., if you allow to copy/save the note as markdown, html, plaintext that’s already six menu entries. It’s something we’ll keep thinking about to find a satisfying solution – just wanted to leave this note here, because it’s an issue that crops up in most cases where we want to export data.

Regarding your second suggestion, you’re saying you would like to link existing files and they should show up as notes in Tropy, right? That’s an interesting idea, but I think we’ll have to punt on it for the time being mainly because of potential syncing and formatting issues (although we could keep those notes read-only in Tropy to side-step most of the issues). A related feature we could probably support more easily is to import/paste markdown to create new notes – but I think you were mostly interested in establishing the link and keeping the external file as the main source of truth, right?

I totally understand! It definitely makes sense to think about the right export workflow to minimize menus/clicks/confusion.

Yeah, that’s correct! I was hoping to be able to integrate my existing notes from Obsidian with the images in my Tropy library. In a way, it would be treating those (markdown) notes similar to what you do with the photos: Leave them in the disk were they are, display them in the associated photos(s). Right now although I could take notes in Tropy, and export/copy them regularly, eventually they would fall out of sync with the ones in Obsidian.

I think this could even go beyond the markdown notes, really. Perhaps an “Attached files” pane would make sense? Or even enabling some sort of links? I’d actually see the potential to just establish links to any kind of file, e.g. PDF (file:///…), Zotero (zotero://…), website, or to-do app(todoist://…). I can then double-click it and the default app takes care of handling it.

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