Tropy for Research Photo Management: About Tropy & Tropy Workshop

Tropy is a free, open-source desktop application that allows you to store, organize, and describe your research photos, such as those taken in archives. It makes finding your research photos easy so that you can use them more effectively. It’s meant to be one part of a scholar’s workflow when dealing with archival documents or manuscripts, or other images.

Tropy is not photo editing software (e.g., iPhoto, Photoshop, Lightroom). It provides only basic editing tools, such as rotate, crop, zoom, and a few others, just enough to make the content of a photo clear and readable.

Tropy is not a citation manager (e.g., Zotero). It does not directly generate citations for use in word-processing software, but it can connect to Zotero - see the Exporting for Zotero tab.

Tropy helps store and organize any number of research photos taken in archives, museums, etc. It streamlines and maximizes the use of the research photos. 

• Free
  • available for Mac, Windows, and Linux
• Store
  • A Standard project (.tropy) contains copies of any images imported into the project
• Organize
  • group photos into lists (e.g. by chapter of a book or thesis)
  • tag photos either individually or in batches
  • combine photos to create multi-page research items
• Describe
  • create customizable metadata templates with fields for each property of your photo (e.g., title, date, author, archive name, collection, box, folder).
  • add metadata to individual photos or to multiple images at once (i.e. editing in bulk)
• Annotate
  • add notes or transcription to a photo in a note editor
• Search
  • search your Tropy project using metadata, tags, and notes
• Export
  • export item(s) in CSL-JSON that can be imported to Zotero for generating citations automatically

• Contact Jane Zhao and K. Sarah Ostrach  if your class or group would like to request a session. 
• Stay tuned for upcoming Tropy workshops