Tropy
Tropy is a desktop research photo manager for organizing archival images, adding metadata and notes, and preparing materials for later analysis.
What is Tropy?
Tropy is a photo and source-management app for researchers who work with photographs of archival and library materials. It helps users organize images into projects, describe them with structured metadata, and keep notes attached to the sources they photographed. Tropy supports customizable metadata templates, tagging, and item-level organization so scholars can keep track of boxes, folders, collections, dates, rights, and other research details in one place. It also supports export workflows such as CSV, JSON-LD, and Omeka S, which can help when moving research data into other publishing or analysis tools. On macOS, users typically install Tropy as a desktop app and use it during archival research, source review, and writing preparation. The app is published by Corporation for Digital Scholarship.
Key features
- Organize archival photos into research projects and items
- Add structured metadata with customizable templates
- Tag sources and browse items by tag
- Write notes and transcriptions alongside images
- Export metadata and notes to CSV, JSON-LD, or Omeka S
- View, sort, and manage large collections of research photos
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Safety overview
Status: Safe
Tropy is legitimate research software used to manage photos and descriptive information for archival work. Access to your files and images is normal for its purpose, since the app is built to organize, describe, and export research materials. The main practical risk is ordinary project-data loss if you remove the app or its support files before backing up active projects and related images.
Recommendation: Keep Tropy if you use it for archival or source-based research. If you no longer use it, you can remove the app, but back up any projects, notes, exports, and linked image files you still need first.
Common paths
/Applications/Tropy.app
Cache paths
~/Library/Caches/org.tropy.tropy
Support paths
~/Library/Application Support/Tropy
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/org.tropy.tropy.plist
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