After transferring the Dropbox folder contain my Tropy project to a new Mac computer (the project had resided on a Windows computer until now), I tried to open my files. I matched up one of the images indexed in tropy with the original image in my project folder and clicked. I then got a “consolidation” error:
{“msg”:“Failed to consolidate photos.”,“stack”:“Error: image type not supported: undefined\n at Image.parse (/Applications/Tropy.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar/lib/index-BFIvIn2P.js:1427:58)\n at async Image.open (/Applications/Tropy.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar/lib/index-BFIvIn2P.js:1411:5)”,“system”:“Darwin 23.5.0 (arm64)”,“time”:1721176810242,“version”:“1.16.2”}
Can anyone advise?
Thank you.
Is this an advanced project or a standard project? In any case, the error indicates that Tropy can’t open the original file. So the first thing I’d try to do is check if the file is indeed on disk and not damaged. If you right click on the photo you can show it in your file manager or open it in an external viewer (the default image viewer registered in your OS).
This is, I think, a standard project. I don’t recall having a choice when I created it several years ago.
Q #1: Yes, I can view the file in the viewer (“Preview”) that is part of the macOS (Sonoma v.14.5)
Strangely, once I’ve viewed the image file in “Preview”, Tropy is then able to open it too. Obviously, I do not not want to go through this procedure for every one of the hundreds of images I have indexed in Tropy, but it does tell me that there is some glitch in the functioning of Tropy, not in my files.
From past discussions on this issue, I thought that, once Tropy has found and “duplicated” one image file, it would be able to find all the rest in a particular folder, but this is not the case here.
If you created it years ago then it’s an advanced project (the new standard project was introduced later on), which means that you’re in full control over where the photos are stored (the standard project gives Tropy more control and thereby eliminates most of the issues around consolidation).
In general, if you move an advanced project to a new device you need to make sure to move both the project file and all the linked photos. I’m assuming they were all in your Dropbox folder, so this is probably fine. Whether or not Tropy is able to find the linked photos on the new device usually depends on how they are linked. If they are linked relative to the project file then everything should be good to go as long as the photos and the project file stayed in the same location relative to one another. If they were linked using absolute paths then it means you will most likely need to consolidate the photos (unless the absolute paths are exactly the same on the new device).
In your case, I’m assuming that the project file and photos are still in the same relative location (since they were together in the Dropbox folder). So the question is how the files were linked: you can find this out by opening the project and go to the project settings in the preferences window: there you should see whether photos are currently linked using relative or absolute paths (note: please don’t change the setting at this time, because doing so will re-write the paths and should only be done when the project is fully consolidated).
If you were using relative paths all should be good already. If using absolute paths you should have to consolidate one photo and most likely Tropy should then be able to consolidate all the other photos automatically (though you may have to consolidate a few more photos if your photos are stored in many separate folders).
All of the above assumes that all the photos are fully synced and available on your disk via the local file system. Many services like Dropbox like to keep all files in the cloud and store local placeholder files on disk and Dropbox will fetch them on-demand if they are accessed. The way Tropy accesses the files over the file system is sometimes incompatible with how these cloud-sync providers measure access so that it’s possible that Tropy only sees the empty placeholder files. I suspect this might be happening in your case: you opened the file in Preview which caused the file to be downloaded and afterwards it worked fine in Tropy. So basically, before taking any of the above steps please make sure that the photo files are fully-synced and actually downloaded. I believe Dropbox calls the feature in question ‘smart sync’ so if you’re in doubt you could try disabling that feature for the folder holding your photos.
Thank you very much. I disabled “smart sync” for the Dropbox folder containing the Tropy project files and then restarted Tropy. Those two steps solved the problem.
I have to compliment you again: you give extraordinary support to us users of Tropy.
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