Hi all, apologies for the possibly naive question: I’m really getting into using Tropy but software is not my strong point!
I’m hoping to turn my existing project into a portable one by saving it to my OneDrive and then accessing it from either my desktop or laptop (though not simultaneously - I have been looking around the forums for advice on Portable projects). The thing is I don’t have a single root file for all my pictures (they are in two separate folders on my hard drive, one for each of the archives involved). If I were to move them to a single file and then add my projects .tpy file (which I backup regularly) and then move it to my cloud storage I would have moved my photos and therefore lose the work I have done on the project thus far, is this correct? Is there anyway around this, or does the fact that I did not from day one operate out of a single root file preclude me from making my project portable?
I hope that makes sense. Any advice folks might have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
This depends very much on where your two folders are relative to each other. The basic idea of creating a portable project right now is to move the tpy file ‘close’ to your photo source folders and ‘re-base’ it: at which point you can move your photos and tpy file together (or access them from different devices if located in a shared folder or external device).
That is, if you have your photos in two folders like: /home/user/Pictures/X and /home/user/Pictures/Y it would be easy to convert them by moving your tpy file into the Pictures folder, then open the project in Tropy, re-base it, close Tropy, and then move both folders X and Y together with your tpy file into a new folder on your OneDrive.
Obviously this gets less practical if your two folders are far apart (because you’d end up with weird folder structure) or even impossible on Windows if the folders are on different disks. In that case it would be preferable to move your folders first and update the corresponding paths in the project file (currently using SQLite, this should get easier to do soon).
Thank you. If I move my .tpy file to another folder (the one with my photos), however, won’t Tropy meet me with the “create new project” screen when I then open it? How would I get from there to the re-basing stage?
EDIT: Ah, I may have cracked it - I opened and rebased, so I think now all I need to do is move all the files to my cloud storage (I’m currently deleting some old stuff to make room for them). Fingers crossed it’ll work out now thanks so much for the help!
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Hi inukshuk - unfortunately I have hit an issue again - both of my folders containing photos are now on my cloud storage, and my .tpy project file is in one of those folders; all is working fine when I use the desktop version of Tropy, but when I open Tropy on my laptop my project is there but the photos are not? As far as I know the desktop version is now finding both the project file and the photos from the cloud so why does the laptop version not find the photos? I’m sort of vaguely keeping up with all this but don’t know what to do next unfortunately. Thank you for your help so far!
EDIT: Actually, all is not well with the desktop version either; the thumbnails are there, but when I click through I’m getting the exclamation mark. I know this is because the photos have moved, but am unsure as to what the next step is?
It’s likely that the project was not actually turned into a portable project: once generated, Tropy will find the thumbnails of your photos even if the originals were moved, so my guess is that the project was probably not re-based yet when you moved the folders (because we have no interface for this at the moment, it can easily happen).
Could upload your project file here? That way I might be able to tell what happened and quickly fix the paths.
You can also send me a private message if you don’t want the project file visible to the public.