Tropy: A Tool for Research Photo Management

Stephen Murray Robertson

srober30@gmu.edu

George Mason University, United States of America

Abigail Mullen

abby@lincolnmullen.com

George Mason University, United States of America

Tropy is a freely licensed and open-source software tool currently under
development by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media that will
allow researchers to collect and organize the digital photographs they take in
their research, associate metadata with those images, and export
both photographs and metadata to other platforms.

Tropy is filling a critical need in the workflow of researchers who visit
archives. This need for photo management has largely arisen since the
widespread adoption of photographing sources in the archives instead of reading
and analyzing them on-site. Postponing analysis to a later moment in the
research cycle proves more difficult than most scholars anticipate: according
to the ITHAKA S+R report “Supporting the Changing Research Practices
of Historians” (2012), researchers now typically photograph everything they
can, and then, faced with “the lack of tools or software to facilitate the
process of capturing and using digital photographs for scholars,” struggle to
“organize and access photographs in a constructive way after a
trip.” Researchers typically depart from the archives with photographs that
might include limited EXIF metadata about the image but never contain any
metadata describing the imaged artifact itself. At present it is difficult if
not impossible for researchers to attach such metadata to images, particularly
regarding their provenance, and to organize them so that scholars can identify
and find what is important to their research projects.

With Tropy, you will be able to:

Import. You will be able to drag and drop one or more JPG images into Tropy.
Importing will add the image files to Tropy’s internal data store,
generate thumbnails for each of the new images, and add preliminary metadata
based on a template.

Edit. Tropy provides the core functions needed to ensure that images are
adequate for your purposes; it is not intended to be a full-featured image
editing software. You will be able to rotate, crop, zoom, and adjust contrast.
Each image’s metadata will also be individually editable. Available fields will
be supplied by customizable templates: Tropy will include generalized archive
templates, based on Dublin Core and EADS; and researchers and archivists will
be able to create their own templates, customized to reflect specific
collections and archives. A batch-editing mode will allow users to manipulate
metadata across multiple images. Tropy will also include an interface for
note-taking and transcription.

Organize. Images will be organized via collections and/or tags, with items able
to appear in multiple collections and under multiple tags. You will have many
ways of finding your archival images: browsing image collections and tags via
list and thumbnail modes; sorting these views using all available metadata,
such as date, source archive, and title; and searching across all available
metadata, including notes.

Share. All items stored in Tropy will be available for export both locally and
to external, web-based services. Exporting a selection of items or a
collection from Tropy will generate an archive file that includes image files
along with their metadata in machine-readable format. You will also be able to
transmit your images and metadata to external services via Tropy plugins. We
will create at least three plugins spanning a range of services - Flickr, Omeka
and an open-source digital asset management software (DAMS) - as well as
documentation that allows users to develop their own plugins.

We anticipate a beta release of Tropy in April 2017, and a 1.0 release in
September 2017.