Hello,
I’m very happy to have found Tropy as successor to my previous photo database (which is no longer supported, as the company was dissolved). However, I have a huge amount of Canon raw images (*.cr2) that are populated with metadata in the old programme, but cannot be displayed in Tropy. Is there a possibility to make a plugin or something for camera raw support?
Tropy uses libvips internally to convert image formats. Currently, libvips only supports cr2 via the optional ImageMagick loader – which is not included in the version bundles with Tropy. Having said that, it would be relatively easy to add support to Tropy, because it would only require supplying a ImageMagick and the specific libraries for RAW support, however, maintaining the custom builds for all supported platforms is quite time intensive and we won’t be able to do that in the foreseeable future.
A plugin with RAW support would be a more feasible solution, especially if it’s using a RAW tool/library that is installed separately. I’d suggest to look into using RawTherapee if it supports a way (preferably via the command line) to extract your relevant metadta. If that’s possible it would be relatively easy to create a custom import plugin.
Thank you for that quick answer!
I will be importing all my metadata, along with the images, via a .csv import, and that can include the .cr2-files (just tested it successfully), so getting the metadata in is not the problem. I still have to figure out how to tweak the .csv to get the caption/title to sit on the photo level, and what to do with my many keywords, but the data itself can all transfer. But then the images cannot be seen in Tropy directly. I’d like to keep them as digital negatives just in case, so converting them is not my first choice (especially as I’d have to re-attach the metadata as far as I can see). Knowing that there are images and opening them in an external viewer would be a little awkward, but is workable in a pinch - but it would be very nice to have them fully included.
Could there be a plugin to connect ImageMagick to Tropy? So it’s not fully integrated in the build, but still available?
In order to use and display the photo in Tropy it has to be converted at some point. You could do this by hand or with a script before you import, or you could automate this using a plugin, but a copy of the file would have to be created at some point. Of course you could keep the raw file around in addition, but a copy would be necessary. However, if you make a script, for example to convert each file you can use the exact same name, with a different extension and then replacing all the files in the CSV file would be trivial. That is, I don’t think there’s an issue linking the files to your metadata, the only downside is that you will have to save duplicate copies of each file. To be fair, though, this is not unlike how Tropy would handle it internally, since Tropy leaves all original files untouched, it also creates full-size copies of files which can’t be rendered natively using WebGL.
In answer to your question, yes, there could be a plugin that uses ImageMagick to convert the photos. Since you’re already using the CSV plugin, I would basically just add the extra conversion step to that plugin. However, it’s probably much easier to convert all the files in one go using the command-line and changing the extension of all the files in the CSV file.
Tropy makes a copy of all the photos even if I am in “advanced” mode, and use the already existing file structure? That would be an issue for me, because I don’t have that much space left on the hard drive. It would mean I’d have to give up my tried-and-trusted file structure, and copy to tropy and then delete the originals.
The cr2 are in there because I want to have the full possibilities that the digital negatives give, but only use that when (or if… ) I do need the image for something. Until then, it saves work and space to have the cr2 file only. (It’s about 30,000 cr2 files, and almost 85,000 files in total.)
For advanced mode Tropy will not make a copy of your images by default. However, for image formats which can’t be rendered directly by WebGL Tropy will create an optimized full-size copy in the image cache. Since cr2 can’t be rendered by WebGL this means that even if Tropy supported cr2 it would still create the second copy of the file in your image cache – so, with regard to the space used on disk it’s not a big difference if you create a copy yourself. The difference with the image cache is that it’s OK to clear it and then Tropy will re-create the copies on demand later on, whereas if you make the copy first and import it then Tropy relies on the copy to be available.
If disk space is at a premium, I’d recommend making optimized copies of all your cr2 files (using a format, size and parameters which are good to work with on your specific screen and optimize for disk space otherwise) and then move the cr2 originals to an external drive or cloud storage so that you still have them to create higher quality versions if you need them.