What is it?

Since its relatively recent introduction, Tropy has been hailed as a game-changer for historians, in part because it is (the only?) software created precisely with helping historians manage their archival images in mind. Tropy offers users the ability to easily organize photographs and PDFs gathered in the archives, add important metadata (including archival record location details), as well as annotate the images themselves with notes. Users can also tag their images for further organization. Multiple images of one document can be easily grouped together into a single document, and multiple documents can be grouped into collections.

For even more functionality, you can export information to JSON-LD and to Omeka.

Tropy is designed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Costs and Other Factors

Tropy is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux 64-bit. It is free and open source.

Pros, Cons, and Other Considerations

Tropy has a robust user guide that makes it easy to get started, as well as active forums.

There are still occasional bugs to work out and new features that users would like to see (see the forum for posts about these), but it's worth noting that the Tropy team seems to actively be listening to feedback and working on updates to increase functionality all the time.

What Others Have Said

• This Why Tropy? video is a helpful introduction.
• Anna Robinson-Sweet, assistant archivist at the New School Archives and Special Collections, wrote this really excellent blog post about using Tropy, which also links to a great post about best practices for taking photos in archives.
• Zoe Jackson, an editorial assistant at the AHA, wrote a helpful article about Tropy on H-Net.
• Abby Mullen, a professor at George Mason University and a Tropy team member, has written about how she uses Tropy for the classroom.
• Research Data Services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also has a helpful starter guide to Tropy.
• David McKenzie, graduate student at George Mason University and associate director of education for digital resources at Ford's Theatre, wrote an incredibly helpful post documenting his workflow using Tropy.