Transferring tags between separate projects

We are doing multiple projects with similar tags and we want to transfer tags from previous projects so that they are available in the new project. Is there a way to do this currently?

You can export all tags to a CSV file. Currently, there’s no built-in way to import CSV but it should be easy to do to insert it into the project database directly. If you don’t use commas (or quotation marks) in your tags the following should work as well:

  1. Open the tags CSV in a text editor and clear the quotation marks.
  2. Copy the comma-separated list of tags.
  3. Select an item in Tropy and switch to the tab panel.
  4. Paste the list of tags into the tag adder and insert them with Enter while holding the Shift key. This should add/create the tags individually.
  5. The only downside is that the selected item is now tagged with all tags. A quick way to clear all tags is to right-click on the item and clear the tags in the tag sub-menu.

Note that if you import the tags this way you will not keep their colors (depending on your configuration they will have no color or a random one). Alternatively you could copy over all tags using sqlite3 – the tags table is simple enough and you really only need to copy names and colors.

An upcoming release will feature a new tag manager that should offer a fully built-in solution.

Alternatively, in case all tags of the previous project are assigned to at least one item, you could copy and paste all items into the new project and then delete the items.