Sundry Works Help · Your phone

Using Sundry Works on your phone

Setting up the phone, whether or not there is a computer as well.

What this gives you

The same Sundry Works, on your phone, working on the same catalogue. Photograph a piece at the easel and catalogue it there and then. Look up a price standing in a gallery. Add a note in the car.

It is not a separate copy and there is nothing to import or send across. Every device you use reads and writes one catalogue. Whatever you do on one is on the other.

The phone does not need a computer to exist. If Sundry Works is the only place your paintings live, the phone is simply a second window onto it, and this page works the same.

What you have to do first depends on where your catalogue is kept, and there are two answers. On the Sundry Works service, which is an account of your own on sundry.works and needs nothing else signed up for - this is what you have unless you chose otherwise. Or in your own Dropbox, which is the only way to share it with the Windows app.

Do this once. After that the phone is just an icon you tap, like any other app.

Before you start

Which store you are on decides what is needed, and the Catalogue folder card on the Configuration tab says which one you are on.

On the service, one thing: your token. Show my token, in Posting on a timer on the Configuration tab, puts it on screen to copy.

In Dropbox, three, and you have all of them already:

• Dropbox installed on the computer and signed in.
• Your catalogue folder sitting inside Dropbox. The Catalogue folder card on the Configuration tab says whether it does.
• Your Dropbox password, for signing in on the phone once.

On the service - putting it on the phone

Nothing has to be set up first and there is no permission to tick. Skip the two Dropbox steps below.

1. On the phone, open your browser and go to app.sundry.works.
2. Press "Already subscribed? Paste your token" underneath the two plans.
3. Paste the token you copied and press Open my catalogue. Your paintings appear.
4. Add it to the home screen so you can tap it like an app. On an Android phone: the three dots in the corner, then Add to Home screen. On an iPhone: the share button, then Add to Home Screen.

One paste per device, and it is remembered afterwards. The token is not kept in the catalogue itself, which is why each device is asked once rather than picking it up from the others.

In Dropbox, step 1 - allow the phone to save

This is a one-off permission, and it has to be done before the phone signs in. Do it on the computer, where typing is easier.

1. Go to dropbox.com/developers/apps and sign in.
2. Click Sundry Works in the list.
3. Click the Permissions tab along the top.
4. Tick the box marked files.content.write.
5. Click Submit at the bottom. Wait for it to say it saved.

Miss this step and the phone will refuse to sign in, saying something about an invalid scope. If that happens, come back and tick the box, then sign in again.

In Dropbox, step 2 - put it on the phone

1. On the phone, open your browser and go to app.sundry.works. The front page at sundry.works is for people who have not met the app yet; the app itself is at the longer address.
2. Press "Already subscribed? Paste your token" and paste your token. That is what proves the subscription, and every device is asked for it once whichever store you are on.
3. You are then asked where the catalogue should live. Choose Sign in with Dropbox, which is the second of the two - the brass button above it keeps the catalogue on the service, which is not what you want here.
4. Sign in. Dropbox will ask if Sundry Works may use one folder - say yes.
5. Your paintings appear. That is the connection made.
6. Add it to the home screen so you can tap it like an app. On an Android phone: the three dots in the corner, then Add to Home screen. On an iPhone: the share button, then Add to Home Screen.

Dropbox only ever lets the phone see the one folder called Apps/Sundry Works. It cannot see anything else in your Dropbox, and nothing else can see your catalogue.

One at a time

Two devices writing to one catalogue at the same moment would end badly, so only one holds it at a time. Think of it as a pen that gets passed between them.

Whichever you open picks the pen up, if the other one has put it down. Closing the app on the computer puts it down. Putting the phone in your pocket puts it down.

If the other one still has it, you get a line across the top saying so - for example, "Phone has the catalogue since 3:12 pm" - with a button beside it. Tap Take over (or Take back on the computer) and it is yours. The screen reloads with the very latest, and the other device goes quiet until you go back to it.

Taking over is always allowed. It is your catalogue and both devices are yours. The line is there so a change can never quietly go nowhere.

While it is opening

Tap the icon and you get three dots and "Starting Sundry Works". A moment later the app itself is up and the dots say "Loading your catalogue" instead. Your paintings are coming down from Dropbox, and on a phone that takes a few seconds.

Nothing is wrong and there is nothing to press. The tabs fill in the moment the catalogue is here.

The computer does not show any of this. It reads the folder off its own hard drive and is finished before there is anything to say.

Leaving the app and coming back

Go off to the camera, or a message, and come back a few minutes later, and the phone starts Sundry Works again from the beginning - three dots, then the catalogue loading. It is not a fault and it is not something the app can prevent. A phone closes down whatever is not on the screen to make room for what is, and it does that to every app on it.

What the app can do is remember where you were. The painting you had open and the tab you were on are put back for you, so you carry on from the same screen rather than from the top of the catalogue.

Nothing you typed is at risk either way. The open painting is saved the moment the screen goes dark, before the phone is allowed to close anything.

Your place is kept for twelve hours. Come back after lunch and you are where you left off; open the app the next morning and it starts fresh on the Overview, which is usually what you want.

How to tell it is working

Catalogue something on the phone, then open the computer and take the catalogue back. It should be there. That round trip is the whole test.

In normal use the app stays quiet. It speaks up when it needs you:

• A line across the top means the other device has the catalogue, and offers to take it back.
• "Catalogue updated from the other device" in the corner means a change has just arrived.
• A red note in the corner means something did not save, and says why.

Give it a few seconds. Dropbox is quick but not instant, especially on a phone that has just woken up.

Checking they are both up to date

Both of them tell you now, from 1.71.1, and neither needs you to go looking.

The computer downloads a new version quietly and installs it when you close the app. The phone has nothing to download - its copy is a website, so the newest one is already there - and it simply says so: a "new version" marker appears beside the version number, and a line offers to reload. One tap and you have it.

The phone checks when you open it, whenever you come back to it after it has been in the background, and every half hour it is left on screen. Coming back to it is the one that matters, because an app left open since before an update is exactly how you end up running an old one.

The version is written at the top of the Help tab on both, so you can always check by eye as well.

This does not reach a copy that is already out of date, and it cannot: an old page has no way of knowing it is old. Reload the phone by hand once to pick this up, and it will tell you itself from then on.

Keeping the catalogue on the service instead

The Dropbox steps above are the right answer if you have a Dropbox account and want the Windows app to share the catalogue. If neither is true, this is the simpler way and it is what you already have unless you chose otherwise.

The Sundry Works service can keep the catalogue for you, in an account of your own on sundry.works. It uses the same token that already writes your stories and runs your post timer, so there is one thing to paste per device rather than three.

Once a device has your token, the first screen offers both stores and the brass button is "Keep my catalogue here" - one press and you are in, with nothing further to type. Sign in with Dropbox sits underneath it for anybody who wants the other one instead. The answer is remembered, so you are asked once per device.

To change your mind later, go to the Configuration tab, find the Catalogue folder card, and press "Use a different store…". That swaps between them and deletes nothing either way.

Two things to know before choosing it, because neither is obvious and both matter.

• The Windows app cannot read it. The Windows app reads a folder on a disk, and this is not one. A catalogue kept on the service is used from a browser, on the phone and on the computer both.
• There is no copy on your own machine, so it needs an internet connection every time. A Dropbox folder sits on your hard drive and can be opened on a plane.

Your catalogue is kept in the same shape either way, so nothing is a one-way door: a catalogue can be copied from one to the other, and anybody who stops using the service can be handed theirs as an ordinary folder that opens on a PC.

What is kept, and what it costs

A catalogue on the service holds what a catalogue always holds, and that includes the private parts: what a painting sold for, who bought it, and any notes you wrote. Those sit on the server rather than in your own Dropbox, which is worth knowing before you put somebody else's catalogue there.

There is a ceiling of one gigabyte for each artist, four megabytes for any one photo, and the usual six progress photos per painting. None of those is a setting and none of them is close: a catalogue of sixty paintings is about forty megabytes. Going past one is refused with a sentence rather than a failure.

A copy is taken once a day and seven days are kept, so a painting overwritten on Tuesday can be fetched back. That exists because keeping a catalogue in Dropbox gives you Dropbox's own file history for nothing, and a catalogue kept here would have had none at all.

It is worth knowing exactly what those seven copies are and are not. They undo a mistake - a painting overwritten, a story deleted - and they do it well. They all sit on the same disk as the live catalogue, so they are not protection against that disk failing. Nothing on the service is, and nothing anywhere else can be. The copy that is somewhere else is the one you take.

Export all works in a browser and always has - on the Backup card, which is on the Paintings tab and on Configuration both. It writes one dated zip holding the whole catalogue: every painting, every photo and every setting. Unzipped, it is a folder that opens in the Windows app, so it is also how a catalogue moves off the service.

What the phone cannot do

Very little now, and it is worth being exact about it, because the short version of this used to mislead.

Your stories are on the phone. All of them. They are kept inside the painting itself, so they travel with the catalogue like everything else, and you can read them, edit them, lock them, and use them on the Card, Label, Post and Reel tabs exactly as you would at the desk.

Writing a new one works here too, from 1.71.0, along with recording narration. See "Writing stories on the phone" below - it needs one thing pasted in first.

Posting works here too, from 1.72.0. Publish appears on the Post tab and the post goes out within about a minute - see "Posting from the phone" below.

And from 1.73.0, so does signing in to Instagram, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky. The three cards are on the Configuration tab here, the same as at the desk. Pressing Connect takes you off to Facebook and brings you back with it done.

Publishing your catalogue to your website works here too, from 1.78.0. It always should have: the publishing became the app's own code in 1.75.0, but the page carried a list of addresses it was allowed to contact and a website was never on it, so every press was stopped before it left. It reported that as "Could not reach the website", which sent people to check a site that was perfectly well.

One thing is still done at the desk, and it is not about your paintings:

• Setting the scheduler up in the first place - though pasting your token into this phone is done here, and that is all this page needs of it.

Everything else works on the phone: cataloguing, photos, progress photos, prices, cards, certificates and labels, images for the web, the reel, the writing, the posting, and now the signing in.

Writing stories on the phone

This needs one thing set up, once per device, and then it simply works.

The reason is worth a sentence. Your AI key is kept in the computer's own keychain, locked to that machine, and a web page has no way to reach a file on your computer. So there is a second copy on the Sundry Works service, and the phone asks it to do the writing. Your computer carries on using its own key and is not affected either way.

To connect a phone or a browser: open the Configuration tab there and find the Sundry Works service card. Paste in the token - it is the same one your computer uses for scheduled posting, and it looks like eight characters, a dot, then sixty-four more. Press Connect.

To get hold of that token, go to the computer: Configuration, "Posting on a timer", "Show my token". Copy it from there. That is the intended way to set a new phone up, and it is the only place the token you already have can still be read. If no device has it at all, "I have lost my token" on the sign-in screen at app.sundry.works sends a link to the address you subscribed with and issues a new one.

The card then shows which account you are on and how many stories today has used. Under it, AI Services is where the key itself goes.

The token is kept in that browser only. It is deliberately not put in your Dropbox folder, because then it would travel into every backup and onto every device - so each new phone or browser is pasted once. Narration needs no token at all: that key has never been stored anywhere and is typed on the Reel tab for the session.

Posting from the phone

For the four connected places - Instagram, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky - press Publish and it goes, the same as at the desk. The post is queued for this minute rather than sent on the spot, so it lands within about a minute, and until it does you can call it back from the list on the same page.

The rest of this topic is for the other three - Pinterest, Story and X - and for a place that is not connected yet. Nothing can post to those from an app at all, so the phone makes the picture and you hand it over yourself, which takes a few taps.

Start at the Ready to post list at the top of the Post tab - it shows you which paintings are waiting. Tap one and it opens below. Set it up as usual and press Make.

The picture appears underneath with a Share button beside it. Tap Share and two things happen at once: the phone offers Instagram, Facebook, Messages and everything else you have, and your caption goes onto the clipboard. Pick Instagram, and when the caption box opens, press and hold in it and choose Paste. The words you wrote are already there.

If no Share button appears, the picture itself is shown below it, with a Copy the caption button under it. Press and hold the picture to save it to your photos, then post it the way you normally would.

Instagram will only accept a picture through the share sheet, never the words with it - which is why the caption goes by the clipboard instead. A line under the picture tells you when it is there. If you want a different one of the eight, the Captions panel further up the same tab has them all with a Copy button each - you no longer have to go to the Story tab for them.

If something looks wrong

• The phone still says read only - it is showing an older version of the page. Close it fully and open it again where there is signal.
• It asks you to sign in again - expected after an update. The sign-in it had was only allowed to read.
• Dropbox refuses the sign-in - the permission in Step 1 has not been ticked and submitted yet.
• The computer says the catalogue folder is not there - Dropbox is not running on the computer. Start it and open the app again. Nothing is lost.
• A red line says Dropbox is using that file - Dropbox had it open for a moment. Wait a few seconds and change something, and it saves. Nothing typed is lost in between.
• It sits on "Loading your catalogue" - the phone has poor signal, or Dropbox is slow to answer. It clears itself either way. If the catalogue then comes up empty, close it fully and open it again where there is signal.
• The phone shows an old painting list - pull the page down to refresh, or take the catalogue over, which reloads it.

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.