Hi there,
I am a research assistant for an art historian. I have been tasked with creating an image database of artworks relevant to the research project we’re working on. The key priorities are
- A platform that is able to accessed and edited by both of us
- The ability to organise images by tags
- The ability to customise metadata to categorise specific to artworks (title, artist, materials, dimensions)
- The ability to annotate images, or add notes with references to where artworks have been cited or exhibited.
I’ve been playing around with Tropy and it has many of these features, but I’m struggling to make a database that is able to be accessed from my computer and her’s. I’ve followed the instructions to create a Portable File, which worked when I tried to access a file I created on my laptop using my university computer (I stored the photos in a folder on OneDrive), but the professor I’m working with couldn’t access the database (the images appeared as coloured blocks on her computer).
Any help anyone might be able to offer, or any recommendations for a cloud-based storage and organisational system would be greatly appreciated.
I think you’ve already found all the relevant information: it’s certainly possible to access a portable project from multiple devices, but there are currently no safeguards against potential sync-conflicts built into Tropy itself. Most network share providers will automatically make backup copies of conflicting files, but you would still have to ‘resolve’ any conflicts manually by reviewing the changes. This is something we’re continuing to work on in Tropy; meanwhile, it can be mitigated by being careful to always make sure your latest changes have been saved to the network share and that you’re not working on the file at the same time. For the upcoming release making projects portable will also be possible via the project preferences:
As for the images appearing as coloured blocks, this means that Tropy was not able to find the original photos on OneDrive or that Tropy had insufficient permissions to access them. If you post the tropy.log file here and tell us the paths to the project file and the photos, I’m sure we can figure out what’s wrong.
Hello, we are trying to use Tropy to work on one project from a Mac and a Pc, and it is not working. When my colleague tries to open the project I created it gets an error message. Please see below and attachment
.
We are starting the project now, so we only have 1 file (we want to make sure we can actually work on the same project before importing 1000+ files).
{“msg”:“SQLITE_CANTOPEN: unable to open database file”,“stack”:“Error: SQLITE_CANTOPEN: unable to open database file”,“system”:“Darwin 24.5.0 (x64)”,“time”:1748554333295,“version”:“1.16.2”}
My questions are:
- Do we need to have the same version of Tropy?
- I tried to follow instructions for a “portable projects” but in my version of Tropy, under Developer menu, there is no “rebase project” option.
- How can we safely set up a multiple-user project whose files are stored in a shared drive?
Thank you
You don’t strictly need to use the same version of Tropy but it’s highly recommended to do so. Instead of the old method to rebase a project, there are now project settings in the preferences window (first open the project, then the preferences window, to see them), but if you’re starting out, the best solution for your use case is probably to pick the ‘standard’ project type. Such a project will already be set up to be portable; Tropy will also make a copy of each photo you import in the project folder, so if you want to manage/control the photos outside of Tropy and not duplicate disk space you’d have to pick the advanced project instead.
Regarding the error message, this most likely indicates that the project file is not where Tropy expects it to be. To debug it further you can check the log file to see exactly what file Tropy was trying to open and then check in your file manager if the file is actually there or not. But there’s probably no need to do this, you can also just pick out the file in the file manager and open it from there. If the file does exist and you get this error, it means that the file contents aren’t right (or even empty).
Hello, thank you for your reply.
The project is located in a shared folder (please see the image).
We both have access to this folder and are trying to open the project from there.
I was able to open the project after my colleague created it, and it worked initially.
Then I made a few changes (specifically, I imported a metadata template created by my colleague), and after that, my colleague was no longer able to open the project. However, I don’t believe that’s the cause of the issue.
It would be ideal not to duplicate the files, but if that’s more convenient, we will do it, and keep the files in the assets folder as well as in another folder.
Thank you for all your help.
Actually, I am also no longer able to open this project. I am attaching the error log here, but the file path seems to match where the project file actually is.
tropy.log (6.3 KB)
The file path is
\sv-nas-tdp\group\APPSEAST\common\CASVA\Accademia\Accademia Tropy\Accademia-Assets.tropy
Thank you
In your error log, Tropy fails to start because it can’t resolve the ‘documents’ folder on your computer, it’s not directly related to your project. You need to make sure that the folder exists that Windows thinks is your documents folder and then restart Tropy.
Hello, thank you for your reply. I am rather confused about Tropy not starting since it was working fine only a few days ago (at least, on my end). The folder is still in the same place, I have not moved, deleted or altered the folder in any way. I am unclear how to solve the issue if the folder is where it says it is, but the software is not working. Thank you, I appreciate your guidance.
Tropy checks the Windows registry at startup for the location of the Documents folder. This check fails if the folder isn’t where it’s registered at for some reason. This really hasn’t anything to do with Tropy – but for historical reasons Tropy will abort the startup in this case. If Tropy started fine before, then something must have happened recently that changed the configured Documents folder on your system. How exactly this works might differ between Windows versions, but I think you should be able to test this using Windows Explorer: look for ‘Documents’ under ‘This PC’ (note, not the folder which you believe to be the documents folder but using this shortcut in Explorer) and right-click on it. There you can select ‘Properties’ and then ‘Location’ where it should show you the location of the folder – from there you can either confirm that the folder is the right one or restore the default.
If this all looks fine and Tropy still does not start with this error, try to shutdown Tropy completely and try again.
Hello, I just wanted to let you know that the issue has been resolved. The problem was that the computer had run some updates, which caused changes to some registry settings. I’m leaving this note here in case someone else encounters the same issue when working with institution-provided computers, as these often have security and update settings outside the user’s control.
I was able to open the project again (I had to reinstall Tropy). The only unfortunate part is that I’ll need to reinstall, enable, and import the plugins and the metadata template.
Thank you again for your help.
