Catalogue photos and documents with Tropy
Nick Peers discovers a free program that can help you to organise your precious research materials
There are only so many ways you can organise your research materials using your computer’s file system. Either you end up with a chaotic clutter of files inside a handful of folders, or you create so many sub-folders that you risk getting lost inside a warren that’s impossible to navigate when hunting for a specific file.
Tropy is a free program for Windows PCs and Macs into which you drag-and-drop your photos or scanned documents (JPEG, PNG and SVG formats are currently supported). Files can then be labelled with both metadata (descriptive information such as title or date) and tags, plus you can attach additional details in the form of notes. All of this information is searchable, making it easy to find the photo or document you need from your collection.
Image files are organised inside a single project. In addition to labelling each file, you can ‘merge’ related items (eg pages from a document) into a single item, plus create user-defined lists to produce additional ways of filtering the data in your collection.
Start by visiting tropy.org to download the program. Windows users should doubleclick the setup file – it’ll automatically install itself and launch; Mac users need to double- click the DMG file, then drag the Tropy icon to the ‘Applications’ folder before launching it from there (click ‘Open’ when prompted).