The Tropy user guide suggests that you move your photos (or make a copy) in a location other than in iphoto before importing them into Tropy.
What are some suggested ways to do this? Or if not suggested, how about possible examples? I am stumped and afraid to mess with my pseudo-system (see below for description) in a way that removes the original date stamps.
I’m not even sure I know how to move bulk photos out of iphoto and what will happen to them (should I make copies? That seems good!) so I am struggling to decide how to proceed and where to put them.
All of my research photos taken since 2018 live in iphoto, as I take them with my iphone. I like keeping them there since I can cross-check their location or search for specific files by looking at the date and time stamp. (I cross-reference with when I added an entry in Zotero for the document I photographed). There is probably a better way to do this but this is how I have a lot of material for my current book project, so I’m stuck for now at least.
So what I’m requesting is: additions to the guide to provide some ideas of how researchers using Tropy have dealt with this file location thing. Specifically, how have researchers taking their photos with an iphone later moved the files to play nicely with Tropy in the long run? (I’ve already been burned once by an iphoto update that moved my files so I want to avoid importing from iphoto, which I apparently can’t do anymore anyway…)
I’ll conclude by adding that I realize the developers might not want to say “do this” but could they compile some examples, perhaps taken from actual users? Without examples, I am stuck at the import photos step and can’t really use Tropy.
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Thanks for the feedback!
Tropy’s current philosophy is not to touch the original photos, because many researches will already have their preferred system in place and because there may be hard requirements for some projects (disk space, different storage locations, play nice with other applications used, etc.) The downside is that you have to help Tropy find the photos again, whenever the photos change (which may be outside your control, as with an Apple Photos update).
We are working on a ‘managed project’ type; this will work similar to how Apple Photos stores photos by making copies (on import) and storing them in folder controlled by Tropy. This will be much easier to use, but it means you may end up with lots of duplicate disk space used.
I’ll let others chip in with their experience, but I know some on the Tropy team prefer to always make copies of photos they also have in Apple Photos. Personally, I do import the original photos directly: when I hit the + icon in Tropy I can find Apple Photos under ‘Media’ in the dialog – importing this way will import the original photos from the Apple photo library; I do this only because I know that I can easily re-associate the files again should Apple decide to make any changes, but it is definitely not something we can recommend to everyone.
If there are no disk space concerns, I think the best way to manage your photos is one folder per Tropy project: that folder contains your project file and all the photos (if you prefer in sub-folders). This way, you can easily backup the entire folder or move it to a different device (where you’d have to consolidate a single photo to update all paths; or alternatively, use a portable project).
But I’ll feel much better about making recommendations once the managed projects are ready.
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