Tropy is a powerful, yet user-friendly, free and open-source software that allows you to effortlessly organize and describe photographs of research material. With Tropy, you can easily combine your photos into items, such as photos of the three pages of a letter into a single item, and group them into lists. You can also provide detailed descriptions of the content of each photograph.

Tropy's customizable metadata templates, complete with multiple fields for different properties of your photo content such as title, date, author, box, folder, collection, and archive, make it easy to manage and keep track of your data.

You can enter information in the template for individual photos or select multiple photos and add or edit information in bulk. Additionally, Tropy offers a range of advanced features such as tagging and adding one or more notes to a photo, which can be a transcription of a document. With Tropy's powerful search function, you can quickly and easily find material in your photos by using metadata, tags, and notes.

What is Tropy is Not!

  1. Not a photo editing software.
  2. Not a citation manager.
  3. Not a research publishing platform.
  4. Not a research writing system.

Features

  1. Organize your research photos in folder, tags
  2. Edit photo metadata
  3. Explore photos by metadata
  4. Browse photos in a grid or a list
  5. Search all your photos and items
  6. Comes with a built-in annotation tool
  7. Extended through plugins

Core plugins

  1. Omeka export
  2. IIIF manifests
  3. CSL export to Zotero.
  4. Archive to Zip file.
  5. Import and export CSV files.

Platforms

  • macOS (Intel)
  • macOS (Apple Silicon)
  • Windows (Arm, x64, ia32)
  • Linux

License

GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL-3.0).

Resources