Tropy items can include one or multiple photos, making it easy to group multi-page documents. All photos within an item share the same metadata. Merging is not intended to collect multiple different documents, but rather to combine multiple photos that belong to the same document. Grouping items into topical or organizational collections is best done with lists or tags.

• You can combine items within Tropy using several methods.

  1. Drag and drop: Drag an item on top of another item to combine them into one item.

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  2. Right-click: Hold down the Command/Ctrl key, then click on each item. Right-click, then click Merge selected items from the drop-down menu.

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• If you want to add photos to an item, and those photos are not already in Tropy, then you have two options.

  1. Right-click on the item you want to add photos to. Select Add photo and select one or more photos from your file system. Click Open. The photo will be added to your item; you can see it in the item pane under Photos.

  2. In the item pane under photos, click the +. Select one or more photos, and click Open.

Merging metadata

Metadata conflicts: When you merge two items that have different metadata, Tropy automatically resolves metadata conflicts this way:

1. If you drag and drop, the target metadata is retained.

2. If you Ctrl+click and use the right-click menu, the metadata from the top item is retained.

Additional metadata: If a metadata field is filled out in one item but is not filled out in others, then the filled metadata field is applied to the entire item.

All merge operations can be undone. You can undo from the top menu, under Edit, or by right-clicking on an item and selecting Undo from the menu.

Explode an item.

You may realize at some point that you have erroneously merged items that should be separate. If you realize it immediately, you can undo by right-clicking and selecting Undo. If you have performed other tasks in Tropy before you realize your error, you should use the Explode function instead.

Right-click on the item you have erroneously merged and select Explode Item. When you do this, each photo in your item becomes a separate item, but each new item retains the metadata that existed in the combined item before explosion. Exploding an item does not restore metadata to an item from before it was merged. From there, you can treat each new item just as a regular item, re-merging or editing the metadata on each item.

Duplicate a photo.

You may find that you have a photo that should appear in two different items. For instance, in a letterbook, the end of a letter may appear on the same page as the beginning of the next one. Tropy allows you to duplicate a photo so it can appear in multiple items.

To duplicate, right-click on the photo in the Photos pane. Select Duplicate Photo. This action creates an exact copy of the photo within its current item, with all the same metadata.

To move the duplicated photo to its own item, right-click on the photo and select Move Photo to New Item. When you do that, the duplicated photo will appear in the item table as its own item, which you can then edit to reflect its separate metadata.

To move the duplicated photo to an existing item, drag the photo from the Photos pane onto the item in the item table that you want to add it to.