
Tropy
Desktop app for organising, describing and annotating photographs of archival research material.
Tropy is a free, open-source desktop application built for people who photograph archival material and then have to live with the results: thousands of images still named IMG_5261.JPG, with the box, folder and collection they came from living only in a notebook. It was created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and is now developed jointly with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History and Digital Scholar, the nonprofit behind Zotero and Omeka.
The workflow is built around research sources rather than camera rollups. Photos are imported by reference, combined into items (the three pages of a letter become one item), described with custom metadata templates, tagged, and grouped into lists. Templates can mix in external vocabularies, including the Dublin Core, RDF and Europeana vocabularies that ship with the app plus any .ttl or .n3 vocabulary you import, so fields map onto archival description practice instead of a fixed schema. Item view adds notes and transcriptions in a rich text editor, selections cut out a detail of a page, and the built-in photo tools only go as far as rotate, crop and zoom to make a document legible. Search runs across metadata, tags and notes.
A project is a single .tpy file backed by SQLite, the storage format the Library of Congress recommends for preservation, and your photos are linked rather than modified, so removing Tropy leaves the originals untouched. Metadata and notes export to JSON-LD, CSV, a ZIP archive or directly to Omeka S, with a CSL export for Zotero; IIIF manifests can be imported, and plugins handle custom formats. Compared with paid photo catalogues such as Adobe Lightroom or Eagle, Tropy adds archival templates, transcriptions and selections but deliberately skips ratings, develop modules and cloud sync, and it is explicitly not a citation manager or a writing environment. Collaboration across machines is still manual: put the project on an external or cloud drive and open it read-only when the research is finished.
Highlights
- Items, lists, tags and full-text search over metadata, notes and tags
- Custom metadata templates with Dublin Core, RDF and Europeana vocabularies, plus imported
.ttl/.n3vocabularies - Notes and transcriptions, selections within an image, and basic rotate/crop/zoom
- Export to JSON-LD, CSV, ZIP archive, Omeka S and CSL for Zotero; IIIF manifest import
- Plugin system for custom imports and exports, with a SQLite-backed project file
- Native builds for macOS, Windows and Linux, including Flatpak, Homebrew, winget and AUR








