Hello! I’m a new Tropy user but diving deep into a book-length research project with over 3,000 images. It took me a week to get the images all into tropy and start transcribing, which I did on a mac laptop. I just tried to open the .tpy file on my mac desktop (the file stored on dropbox). I see all the metadata but the images are showing up blank. I can click on them to reconnect, but I cannot do that for over 3,000 images!! And none of them have moved - all the images are also in a dropbox folder in the same account, and also available offline on the desktop as well as the laptop.
I have to give the laptop in to get lobotomized (wiped, surveillance software added) to get reimbursed for it, so not having it open on the desktop is terrifying!! I did check and my understanding was that it was all supposed to sync smoothly as long as the tropy file and the image source files were all on dropbox together.
What am I doing wrong? Please help!
I suspect that you the shared folder is not synced fully to your desktop computer yet. Dropbox and similar services often only sync files on demand. Since Tropy accesses files directly on the file system this often doesn’t register correctly with such services and in that case Tropy will not see the real images but just placeholder files. To work on the project, just configure Dropbox to fully sync the project folder to your local computer.
On macOS you can right-click on the Tropy project and pick ‘show package contents’. This will open the project folder in a new Finder window. If you look into the assets folder there, that’s where all the photos are. Make sure that folder is fully-synced and then open the project again. At first, Tropy will be consolidating (in this case: creating thumbnails for all the images) and then everything should show up fine.
I appreciate the reply, but unfortunately I’m still in the same spot. I have had Tropy open all day after making sure the tropy and source files were definitely downloaded on my harddrive and the images aren’t loading. I don’t have “show package contents” on my right-click menu on Sequoia 15.7.4 - maybe because it’s a dropbox file?? I tried finding it through Spotlight and couldn’t get any viewable files.
Also, I don’t know if this is relevant, but Tropy crashes every time I try to close it. I get the “Wait” or “Close Window” pop-up but nothing ever happens either way, so I have to Force Quit.
If all files are downloaded it could be a permissions issue. Can you send the tropy.log file after trying to view a photo? You can open it via Help → Show log files in the menu.
Here’s the log file - When I click on one of the blank icons for a photo there’s a button to “consolidate", but I can’t do that for so many photos individually!
tropy.log (17.3 KB)
Oh also - I did try “Consolidate photo library” and it showed the “Consolidating photo….” at the bottom left, but when it was done nothing had changed. Also, it turns out I have over 3,000 files, but 52,000+ separate images, lol.
ETA: I tried to upload the log file after doing this but it’s too big.
It’s fixed! I changed the setting on the laptop from absolute file paths to relative file paths and it’s all consolidating correctly now!! Hurrah!
Yes, based on the log file it looks like the Dropbox folder was in two different location on the two computers. In general, for shared files it’s best to use ‘relative paths’ in advanced projects. This will work well as long as the project file and the photos always move together.
It’s important to note that you need to change the setting on the computer where the paths are matching – but it sounds like that’s what you did do, so I hope everything works now.