Organize archive photographs of manuscripts, explore the evidence inside them, and turn your research into cited figures, maps, and decks, without losing the connection to the source.
v0.9.0 · macOS beta · Windows in development
After an archive visit, the photographs multiply, but the evidence around them fragments. Sequence and identity live in filenames, shelfmarks and rights in a notebook, transcriptions somewhere else, and the argument somewhere else again. The notes and transcriptions you make in the reading room can be harder to replace than the photographs themselves. Recto/Verso keeps every image connected to its context and to everything you discover inside it.
Turn a folder of archive photographs into a trustworthy, navigable source set, whether it holds a manuscript, a run of letters, or another collection of documents.
Arrange a session in reading order and keep each image's identity stable. Auto-sequence manuscript folios and recto/verso sides, or use object labels for loose documents and material that is not foliated.
Record repository, shelfmark or call number, photographer, rights, notes, and keywords alongside the image. When you click Apply, those essentials are written into the image files themselves, so the context travels with the photographs when you share or publish them.
Record who granted reproduction rights, the reference number, date granted and expiry, and which arenas are cleared: academic print, academic online, commercial, exhibition, broadcast. See the rights status of each image at a glance.
Verso–recto spreads (010v–011r), roman-numeral flyleaves (iv r), and quire signatures (A1r, B1r) sit alongside plain arabic foliation. Batch tools handle a whole range at once.
Work with the evidence inside each image, from making a difficult passage legible to connecting it with a transcription, an annotation, or a scholarly source.
Use levels, gamma, decorrelation stretch, local contrast, brightness, contrast, and channel isolation to recover difficult writing and underdrawing. Enhanced versions are saved separately; your image's pixel data is never edited.
Draw a box around a passage, seal, initial, marginal hand, damaged patch — or one fragment on a plate of many — and describe that with its own label, tags, note, caption, or transcription.
Keep the image beside diplomatic transcription, supplied expansions, and translation as you work. Move between folios without losing the connection back to the photographed page.
Link a source to the page or marked detail it discusses, including a page locator. Import from Zotero or add references directly, then format citations in Chicago automatically.
The Reference Library persists across projects, so books, articles, theses, and source images stay available across your work. Research Projects can also hold manuscript records before you have photographs, giving a finding-aid lead or footnote a home before the archive visit.
Turn connected evidence into something another person can understand without rebuilding captions, citations, rights, and provenance by hand.
Turn recorded relationships into a stemma, provenance diagram, family tree, attribution cluster, or timeline. Regenerate live figures as the underlying research changes.
Build locator and provenance maps with searchable modern names and historical exonyms. Add pins, labels, arrows, and regions fully offline; no tile server or upload required.
Create repository charts, codex-anatomy views, and attention maps from the material you have already cataloged, with a route back to the underlying evidence.
Combine source pages and figures in a PowerPoint deck with derived captions, citations, and credits, plus an advisory rights review before export. The evidentiary context comes with the image.
The same source stays connected to its identity, your observations, the scholarship around it, and the final output you publish or present.
Open a folder, establish the order and identity of the material, and record the repository context and rights. Apply previews proposed filenames and flags conflicts before it writes metadata or renames files.
Improve legibility, mark details, transcribe passages, add notes and tags, and connect secondary sources without separating the observation from the image.
Use the same connected evidence in figures, maps, charts, and decks, carrying citations, captions, and credits into the final output, with rights reviewed before export.
Recto/Verso is in active beta. Leave your name and email; we'll reply with next steps and a download link.
See how Recto/Verso and Tropy differ →
macOS beta · Windows in development