I have been cleaning up data and to make sure I had enough storage going forward, moved my folders over to another drive. Settings altered to match this drive and everything working great. I did rename the media folder so Name wasn’t used ( just “Family Tree_Media” so this then allows searching for media with name - known search issue…)
However… When downloading new media from Ancestry, the download re-creates the original download folder “Name Family Tree_Media” instead of downloading to the new Media folder.
No, you aren’t missing anything! As MadDog said, TreeShare will ONLY download media to a folder named after your database with a _Media appended, so in your case this would appear to be ‘Family Tree_Media’. The path that you may have entered into the settings is not relevant to TreeShare, you will still need to manually move/rename media into your chosen file structure.
I do find that its strange that Rootsmagic Treeshare can’t download to the default folder as set in settings ! but, if that is what it is, I will rename media folder back to original, to save the hassle of having to move things.
Wonder if this could possibly be a future upgrade ?
Cant be that hard for the default download location to be changed from fixed internally, to look at default listed in setting and re-route to there ?
Very doubtful! One reason would be that RM would have no way to know specifically where you wanted the media. Most of us have some type of structure setup for media, not just one big folder. For example, I have a Media folder which contains a Census folder, a Vitals folder and many others. Some of the subfolders contain subfolders too, such as the previously mentioned Vitals which has Birth, Death and Marriage as a subfolder and my Census folder has subfolders for each year as well as the folders for the various states.
Rootsmagic would need to be able to determine what each downloaded piece of media was then have to work out where it went which when you multiply this times all of the possible arrangements that people want to use…makes it impossible.
With one huge exception, RM doesn’t put any media files anywhere. You just put them where you want them, name them anything you want, and add a link to them in RM. It feels like you are adding media files to RM, but you are only adding links.
The default media folder is a part of that linking system. In some ways, the default media folder doesn’t mean what you might think and indeed in some ways doesn’t mean very much. As a practical matter for most users, it’s simply the folder that RM opens first when you are linking new media files into RM. It’s often the case that you then need to navigate to where the media files really are.
The huge exception is of course TreeShare. In the case of TreeShare, media files are a whole separate system then the media files that you link into RM yourself. RM is putting media files somewhere and it is naming them what it wishes. It gives the files meaningless names. I don’t know if RM is inventing the meaningless names, or if Ancestry is inventing the meaningless names. When RM (via TreeShare) is putting the media files somewhere, the “somewhere” is a special media files folder for TreeShare that has nothing whatsoever to do with the default media folder. The special media files folder for TreeShare is named dbname_media, where “dbname” is the name of your RM database. The special folder is a subfolder of the same folder than contains your RM database. If you rename the special folder or move it to a different folder than your RM database, then RM will not be able to find it or the files it contains.
As to whether RM’s two separate systems for media files could ever be combined, that’s hard to know. It seems to me that it would be very hard to do. The system for your media files is totally under your control. The system for TreeShare’s media files is totally under RM’s control. It’s therefore hard for me to see how the two systems could ever be reconciled into a single system for media files.
My advice is either to download media files yourself from Ancestry without using TreeShare or else use TreeShare and accept the way TreeShare does it. I don’t see a secret option #3.
I agree that this is a common view but it doesn’t need to be the case. RM has simply defined a default naming convention and folder location for media downloads that utilize the Treeshare API. If you think of it in that light --that it’s just the default location – then it doesn’t need to be a whole separate system, just as the Download directory (which is the default location for downloads manually initiated by the user) doesn’t create a separate system for manually attached media.
With regards to media, the main difference between TreeShare vs manual entry is whether the user-defined workflow manages the media name and/or location before or after linking it to the RM database. Like Ken mentioned, I have a pre-defined media folder structure that works for me. TreeShared media needs to be dragged to the desired folder and, because the file is already linked to the RM db, the “Fix broken media links” tool needs to be run. It’s not that big of a deal once it becomes habit. With this approach, TreeShare’s default media folder would be empty except immediately after a download.
Granted, it’s simpler to rename media files before linking them to the db, but the use of the API doesn’t allow that option. Even changing the file name is not that big of a deal once it’s part of a regular workflow.
yes agreed that is what I was referring to before.
Allowing users to make changes would open way to many opportunities to mess thing up.
I came from FTM where Ancestry and FTM managed things-- when I came to RM I did not realize how badly. I rebuilt basically all my media from scratch download manually, named media (something meaningful) yes was it a bit of work ---- but the payoffs were huge. (Direct to other users such as Den1968)
As Jerry says above… RootsMagic is less strict than Ancestry and Online RootsMagic Help site is pretty clear about “where” it opens to and that it is by default the folders from Settings.
