Sundry Works Help · Configuration

Configuring Sundry Works

Where everything plugs in: your social accounts, your website, your AI service, and where the catalogue lives.

What it's for

Everything that plugs into something else. Your Instagram, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky connections, the timer that posts while the computer is off, the card that publishes your catalogue to your own website, the service that writes your stories, and the folder your catalogue lives in.

All of it used to sit halfway down the Business tab, in between your contact details and your colours. None of it is your business details, so it has a page of its own. Nothing about connecting has changed - the same cards, the same buttons.

You do not need any of it to catalogue a painting. Set a connection up on the day you want the thing it does.

Light or dark

Sundry Works has always been dark. There is a light one now, and the switch is on this tab, under Writing. It is the logo's own colours the other way up - aged paper, the deep navy of the lettering, the same brass and teal and terracotta that are already in the little painted details. The menu bars stay dark either way, because the logo is cream inside a dark frame and this is the same arrangement.

It is remembered on this device only, so the phone in a bright studio and the computer in the evening can be set differently. That also means a new browser, or one whose site data has been cleared, starts on dark again - one press to change back.

Nothing you make changes. A card, a label, a reel, a certificate or a business card carries the colours it will be printed and posted in, and those belong to the painting rather than to the window it was made in.

If the light one looks faint anywhere, say so - it was measured surface by surface rather than eyeballed, and anything that reads badly is a number that can be moved.

Stories and captions

Plenty of artists never write either one. This card has a switch for each: Stories, the long piece written from the artwork that fills the card, the back label and the reel, and Captions, the short version cut from a story, for posts. Both ship on, so an existing catalogue opens exactly as it always has.

Turn one off and everything built from it disappears - its panel on the Story tab, its tick on the Paintings list, and the places it was offered on the Post tab. Nothing already written is deleted. Switch it back on and all of it returns exactly as it was.

Turn both off and a box called "About this art", on the Story tab, takes over as the source: type a few sentences there and they fill the card, the back label, the reel, a post and your website page, and the social captions are written from it too. With only one switch on, that same box is what an older painting falls back to if it has no words of its own from the writer still switched on.

The four connections

Instagram and Facebook are one connection wearing two names, and it is the longest to set up. Threads is its own connection again, and needs the Instagram and Facebook one working first. Bluesky is the quick one: a handle and an app password, nothing to register.

Each has a guide of its own in this book - Instagram & Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky - with every step and what to do when one of them refuses.

All four can be signed in to from the phone as well, from 1.73.0. The cards are the same ones. The difference is only what happens when you press Connect: at the computer a browser opens and comes back with the answer, while on the phone the page goes off to Facebook and Sundry Works loads again a minute later with it done. Bluesky behaves the same in both, because it has no sign-in trip to make.

Signing in from the phone, and what it costs

This is worth one honest paragraph, because it changed something that used to be promised the other way.

Signing in to Facebook means swapping a code for a key, and that swap needs your App Secret. At the computer the secret sits in the Windows keychain and never goes anywhere. For the phone to do the same job, the Sundry Works service has to hold a copy - there is no way round it, because Meta offers no secret-free way to do the swap.

Before this, the service held a key that could post as you but not the secret that makes fresh ones, so disconnecting genuinely locked it out. That is still true, and it is why disconnecting from the phone deletes the secret as well as the key. Nothing on the server can let itself back in afterwards. The price is that reconnecting means pasting the secret in again, and the card says so at the time.

It also buys something, and from 1.74.0 it genuinely does it. An Instagram and Facebook connection lasts sixty days and used to be renewed only by your computer, so two months with the PC switched off would have stopped posting with nothing saying why. The scheduler renews it itself now: it acts in the three weeks before a connection would lapse, and it does that whether or not anything is queued.

This is the one place where it matters which window you signed in from, so it is worth being plain about. Signing in on the computer keeps the key that does the renewing on the computer - on purpose - so that connection stays the computer's to look after, exactly as before. Signing in from the phone leaves the scheduler holding what it needs, and it keeps that one alive on its own.

So if you want to stop having to open the computer at all, sign in to Instagram and Facebook from the phone once. Nothing breaks while you decide - the connection you have carries on working either way.

Bluesky is not part of any of this. Its app password is used once to sign in and is never kept - only the session it produced. Revoking it in Bluesky is the end of it, whichever window you signed in from.

One address has to be added in the Meta dashboard for this to work: https://sundry.works/api/connect.php, in both the Instagram and Facebook app and the Threads one. It sits alongside what is already there rather than replacing it, so the computer's own sign-in carries on exactly as before.

Publishing to your website

The card called "Publish to your website" puts your catalogue on your own WordPress site - one page per painting, with the story, the picture, the medium, the size, the price and whether it is still for sale. It needs three things once: the address of your site, the WordPress user the password belongs to, and an application password.

An application password is not the login you type yourself. Make one in WordPress under Users, then Profile, then Application Passwords. It comes as six short blocks. Paste it in and press Save - and note that typing in the boxes does not save anything on its own, which the badge above them will tell you. Once saved, the heading changes to name the site you are publishing to, so you can always see where the next run is going.

Saving checks the password against your site there and then, and says "Saved, and the sign-in works" when it does. If WordPress will not accept it, it says so and does not keep it - which is the moment to find out, rather than halfway through a publish. If your site cannot be reached at the time, it saves anyway and tells you it could not check.

Then there are two buttons, and only one of them sends anything. Check first reads the whole catalogue and prints a report - every painting, its address on the site, and anything worth looking at, like a painting with no story or no picture. It sends nothing at all, so it is always safe to press, and it is the one to press first. Publish is the one that writes, and it writes the moment you press it. That is why Check first is the filled button and Publish is outlined.

The most useful part of that report is the list of what a publish would actually change. Edit one story, press Check first, and it names that painting and says the story is what differs - so you know before you send anything that one page will change and the other fifty-nine will not. It counts only the words and facts that print on the page: recording a sale, writing yourself a note, or rewriting a draft you did not choose will never make a painting look like it needs republishing.

Paintings published before this was added cannot be compared - the publisher had no record of what it sent - and the report says so rather than guessing. It sorts itself out the first time you publish.

After an update that changes what counts as a change, the first Check first can name every painting at once. That is the update catching up rather than sixty things going wrong: the publisher is comparing against records written before the new rule existed. Publish once and it settles down again.

The report names the gallery each painting is going to, on every line. If you have moved one to a different gallery since it was last published it shows both, as "Umberdawn -> Nickeldusk", so you can see the move before you send it. Every run finishes with a count of your paintings by gallery, which is the quickest way to notice that a gallery you have just set up holds six paintings when you filed seven.

Moving a painting to a different gallery counts as a change, so Publish sends it and its page on the website moves with it. The gallery on the site always follows the one in Sundry Works and there is nothing to file by hand over there. A gallery you have only just created is made on the website the first time a painting in it is published.

Publish only sends the paintings that changed. If you edited one story, it sends one painting and tells you: "1 painting(s) sent, 59 unchanged and skipped". If nothing has changed it sends nothing at all and does not even contact the site. That makes an everyday publish a second or two rather than a couple of minutes.

Publish leaves live pages live and brings them up to date. A brand new painting goes up published, so pressing Publish puts it on the website. A page you have parked as a draft in WordPress on purpose stays parked. There is no way to unpublish from this card - that is deliberate, because it is the kind of thing you would only ever do by accident.

A painting can be kept off the website altogether. On the Paintings tab, under Notes, there is a tick called "Keep this painting off the website" - for a commission still with its buyer, a study kept for the record, anything not for showing. Neither button will send it, and "Send everything" does not override it. Check first gives them their own list at the foot of the report, headed "Kept off the website", so you can see at a glance which paintings are being held back.

That tick does not take a page down. A painting already on your site that you tick afterwards keeps the page it has, and the report marks it - "already has a page there; it stays until you delete it in WordPress". Taking a live page off the internet is a thing to do on your site, deliberately, rather than a thing a tick does quietly.

New paintings used to arrive as drafts for you to approve on the site, which meant pressing Publish and finding nothing there. Check first is the approving step now, and it shows you every page before one of them is sent.

Check first also tells you when a painting has no alt text or no description. Both are a sentence written for that one painting, both are used by search engines rather than shown on the page, and nothing else would ever tell you one was missing. Without alt text the picture is invisible to Google Images. Without a description, the site falls back to your Instagram caption, which is about three times the length Google will print. There is nowhere in the app to write either one yet.

Underneath, a pane shows what the run is doing as it goes, and it stays there afterwards so you can read it. If you switch tabs mid-run, the run carries on and the report is still there when you come back.

Above that pane, a single line says what is happening right now - reading the catalogue and how far through it is, working out what has changed, reading the pages already on your site, then sending each painting by name. That line is thrown away when the run ends; the report is what stays.

Both buttons are noticeably slower in a browser than on the computer, and a minute or more is normal. It is not your website: neither button has contacted it yet at that stage. Both read the whole catalogue first, photographs included, and in a browser that is a download rather than reading your own hard drive. The line above the pane is counting that download.

Press Check first and read the report before you ever press Publish. It costs nothing and it is the only way to see what a run is about to do.

When the website card needs a hand

If a run stops early saying WordPress did not accept the sign-in, nothing was sent and nothing on the site was touched. Make a fresh application password in WordPress under Users, then Profile, then Application Passwords, and paste it in again. Check the user name on the card matches the WordPress user you made it under. A password can also be revoked from that same screen, which looks exactly like a wrong one from here.

The publishing is the app's own code, so there is no separate program to find and no folder to point at. There used to be, and the card used to say "Publisher not found" or ask you to restart after an update. Neither can happen now.

The phone can publish too. It is the same catalogue and the same record of what was sent, so it does not matter which one you press it from. The password is the one thing that does not travel: it is kept in the browser you paste it into, so each phone or browser asks for it once.

AI Services

This is where you choose which service writes your stories and paste that service's API key. Pick a provider from the Story provider list, then paste its key below. Either way the key is kept separate from your business and painting records, and never leaves except in requests to the provider you pick.

Where it is kept depends on which window you are in, and the card says so rather than making you remember. On the computer it goes into the machine's own keychain, locked to your Windows account. In a browser there is no keychain to use, so it goes to the Sundry Works service instead - the same server that does your scheduled posting. The card in a browser is a separate key from the one on your computer, and either can be replaced without touching the other.

There are two, and both of them look at the painting while they write. Google (Gemini) is the default and has a generous free tier, so it is a good place to start - get a free key at aistudio.google.com. Anthropic (Claude) gives the best writing quality and is paid, though not by much: at one or two paintings a month, ten dollars of credit lasts years rather than months.

Groq was a third choice until 1.66 and has been taken out. It could not see the painting - the one model it had that could look at a picture was retired from its free tier - so it wrote from the title and the facts you typed while the app still made you attach an image. If Groq was the one you had picked, you are on Gemini now and there is nothing to do about it.

Under the provider list is a line about what that service does with what you send. It is worth reading, because the note above it is about your key, not your painting - and the painting is the thing that actually gets sent. In short: Google's free tier may use it to improve their products and human reviewers may see it, their paid tier is not used that way, and in the UK, the EU and Switzerland the paid terms apply to both; Anthropic does not train on anything sent through its API on any tier, and deletes paintings once the request has been answered.

Use Save to store a key, Test key to check it works, and Clear to remove it. Below that, choose which model writes your stories - you can switch provider or model anytime, with nothing to rebuild. If a model is ever renamed, the one you picked stays picked.

The Sundry Works service

This card only appears in a browser, and it is what lets the phone write stories at all. It takes the token your computer already uses for scheduled posting - eight characters, a dot, then sixty-four more - and once it is in, the AI Services card above it starts working here too.

It also shows how many stories today has used against the daily limit. That limit is there because the key is on a server now: anyone holding the token could spend against your account, and a ceiling turns a leaked token from an expensive problem into an annoying one.

"Show my token" reads it back out of this browser, which is how you set up another one. Nothing reads it on its own - it appears when you press the button and goes again when you press Hide.

Disconnect removes the token from this browser. Be aware it is one token for two jobs - disconnecting here stops scheduled posting from this browser as well.

The token is kept in that browser alone and deliberately not in your Dropbox folder, so it never travels into a backup or onto a device you did not put it on. That is why each new phone or browser asks for it once.

Where your catalogue lives

Your catalogue is a folder. The Catalogue folder card on this page shows you exactly which one, and whether it sits inside Dropbox. Inside that folder the app keeps a folder called "store" - your paintings and their photos - and beside it a small note saying which device has the catalogue. You choose the folder that holds them; the app looks after what goes in it.

When it sits inside Dropbox, three things follow. Dropbox carries every change up to the cloud within seconds, so a fire or a dead hard drive cannot take your work with it. Dropbox keeps its own history of every file, so a painting edited by mistake can be put back. And your phone reads and writes that same folder, which is what lets you catalogue a piece on either one.

Change storage folder points the app at a different folder. Pick the folder you want, and the app tells you what it found there before anything happens. If that folder already holds a catalogue, it offers to use that one - nothing is copied and nothing is deleted, the app simply reads and writes there from then on, which is what you want on a second computer or after a reinstall. If the folder is empty, it offers to move this catalogue across instead, keeping the old folder under a dated name. Nothing happens until you choose.

Sharing the folder with Dropbox has one small cost. Dropbox opens each file to carry it up to the cloud, and while it has one open, Windows will not let the app write over it. The app waits that out - about a second, which is far longer than it ever takes - so you should never see it. If a save is ever refused anyway, a red line appears under the painting and says what happened: Dropbox is using that file, wait a few seconds and change something to save it again. Nothing typed is lost while you wait.

The app remembers what it has already read, so opening it a second time and opening a painting you have looked at before are both quicker. It only trusts that memory while this device holds the catalogue, because that is exactly when no other device can be changing it. The moment the other one has the catalogue, the memory is ignored and everything is read fresh from the folder. You never have to think about it, and it can never show you an older version of your own work. Changing the storage folder clears it, as does moving the catalogue.

Keep the folder set to available offline in Dropbox. Then the app is reading your own hard drive and stays fast, and Dropbox does the carrying in the background.

Backup

There is a card called Backup at the top of this column, and the Paintings tab carries it too, on the What's next board - as a fifth card when a backup is due, and as one grey line saying how long ago when it is not. It is in two places on purpose. Nobody goes looking for a backup on a good day - they go looking on the morning a painting is not where they left it, and a settings page is the last thing anybody wants to be searching through then.

It says when your last backup was taken, in so many words, and turns red here if you have never taken one or if the last one is over a month old - which is also when the Paintings tab starts showing it as a card to do. That date is kept with the catalogue rather than on one machine, so the phone and the computer give the same answer about the same paintings.

The backup is the zip that Export all writes. That is true wherever your catalogue lives - in Dropbox, in a folder on this computer, or on the Sundry Works service. If your catalogue folder happens to sit in Dropbox then Dropbox keeps its own file history as well, which is a real second copy and worth having; it is not the thing to rely on, and an artist on the service has none of it.

One thing a backup only does if you move it: keep a copy somewhere that is not this computer. A zip sitting in the same folder as the catalogue goes when the disk goes. A memory stick, a second drive, or an email to yourself is the whole of what is needed.

Taking one costs a press and a minute. There is no schedule, no setting and nothing to switch on - which is deliberate, but it does mean the only thing that takes a backup is you pressing the button.

Loading, exporting, and restoring

What each of the buttons does, in full:

• Export all - saves the whole catalogue as a single dated zip. Everything: every painting, its photo, its progress photos, and every setting you have made - your logo, your font, the card frame, the business profile, the pricing anchors, the story prompts. About 36MB for sixty paintings. This is your backup, and it is also a fixed snapshot you can keep on a memory stick or email to yourself.
• Unzip it and you have your catalogue as an ordinary folder, which is the same shape the app keeps it in. So it is also how a catalogue moves: unzip it, press Change storage folder, and point at it. Put it in Dropbox and the phone reads it. Nothing about it needs this app to open it - the paintings are plain JPEGs and the records are plain text.
• Restore from file - loads one back in. It shows you what the file holds and waits for a second click before writing anything, because a restore overwrites your business profile if the file carries one. It merges rather than wiping, so anything already here is kept or overwritten by the newer file. It takes the zip, and it still takes every older backup, including the single-file ones this app used to write and the "everything" export from the older Claude.ai version.
• Load paintings - reads every painting in the folder and rebuilds the list from what is there. Press it after pointing the app at a folder that already holds a catalogue, or any time the list looks out of step with the folder. It is a read, not a repair: nothing is thrown away. It is on the Catalogue folder card rather than the Backup one, because it is not a backup: it loads what is already in the folder in front of you.

If the app ever says the catalogue folder is not there, nothing has been lost. It means Dropbox is not running, or the folder has been moved or renamed. Start Dropbox, then open the app again.

The rest of the Help

Start here

• Getting started with Sundry Works - What Sundry Works does and how the tabs fit together.
• Using Sundry Works on your phone - Setting up the phone, whether or not there is a computer as well.

Your catalogue

• What's due and what's unfinished - The first tab: what's coming up, what's still to do, what's unfinished.
• Cataloguing your paintings - Your catalog - add paintings and open the one you're working on.
• Reviewing everything one painting makes - Everything the open painting makes, on one page, with the one decision each needs.
• How to price a painting consistently - Work out a consistent price for the open painting.
• Tracking what sold and who bought it - What sold, who took it home, and what it brought in.
• Printing show labels and a portfolio - More than one at a time: a whole show's labels, or a portfolio to send.

Making things from a painting

• Writing a story for a painting - Generate a written story for the painting and keep the best one.
• Making a printed card for a painting - Lay out the printed card for the painting.
• How to make a certificate of authenticity - A painting's two printed documents: its certificate, and the label for its back.
• Web-sized copies of a painting's photo - Export web-sized copies of the painting's photo.
• Branded posts of your paintings - Branded static posts for Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
• Making a reel of a painting - Build the vertical reel frame and video for social media.
• Designing an artist's business card - The card you hand out, laid out down to the last millimetre.

Running the business

• Setting up your artist brand - Set up once: your identity, brand assets, colours, and AI key.
• An address book for galleries and collectors - A simple address book for galleries, collectors, suppliers, and more.
• Checklists for shows and studio jobs - Reusable checklists for shows, errands, and anything you repeat.
• A calendar for shows and deadlines - Shows, deadlines, and events, with a countdown to each one.
• All your post comments in one list - What people said on your posts, from every platform, in one list.

Connections and setup

• Posting to Instagram and Facebook - Connect your accounts so you can post directly from Sundry Works.
• Posting your paintings to Threads - A second Meta connection, separate from Instagram and Facebook.
• Posting your paintings to Bluesky - The easiest connection of the four - a handle and an app password.
• Scheduling posts to go out later - Line a post up now and let it go out later, with the computer off.
• Configuring Sundry Works - Where everything plugs in: your social accounts, your website, your AI service, and where the catalogue lives.