I am currently part of a large research team at my university, one aspect of our project is archival, I am on the “archives working group” part of the larger team. I see the value in using Tropy, but it is not clear to me how this works in a team situation- can different Tropy accounts work with each other? Is it better to set up one Tropy account for the research team to use or to have individual accounts for team members and then share between them?
I have watched all the webinars I could find and they are all showing how it works for an individual researcher, no discussion of how Tropy would work with a larger team.
Would be great to meet with someone from Tropy and talk this through if that is possible.
Tropy is an application that runs locally on your computer. There are currently no accounts at all: you create project files, consisting of a database file and your photos, and Tropy saves all the information to this database file. You can move or access the project file from multiple devices (e.g. if you put it into a folder shared) but you need to be careful not to work on the project at the same time because this way you might create sync conflicts or overwrite the work of someone else. That is to say, it is possible to work on the same project file from multiple devices, but you need to be careful and know what you’re doing.
A strategy to make this easier might be to create multiple project files, one each for different parts of the project. You can copy and paste items between projects, so you could have individual team members work on separate sections of the project concurrently and later merge the work into the main project file.
Various collaboration scenarios is also something we’re working to improve. In the short term, we’ll introduce new project features that will make it easier to move and share a single project, as well as a way for projects to automatically resolve sync conflicts.