I’m in the process of trying to eliminate most of my paper files and use only digital copies (with appropriate backups, of course). I began experimenting with my mother’s death certificate to try to come up with a process that requires the least number of steps yet allows me to find what I need easily.
My question involves attaching media files to multiple facts and people. I seem to be creating a new copy of the media file every time I use it, resulting in a LOT of copies of the same media. I’m sure there is a way to avoid that, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.
I’m using RootsMagic 11, although I suspect this issue isn’t specific to the version.
Ok, I failed to see the Select Existing Media tab. I went through and deleted this media item from everywhere it appears, and when I click on Media from the Person View, it no longer shows up.
However, when I attempted to add it back the first time after all the deletions, the Select Existing Media tab still shows about 7 choices of the same thing, even though I hadn’t added it back yet.
This problem has been discussed before and a fix has been requested before. It’s not clear to me if RM views it as problem that needs to be fixed or not.
For reasons that don’t matter to this discussion, I prefer Add New Media to Drop New Media, which does expose me to the risk of encountering this problem. For that reason, I always keep my RM system set to Select Existing Media rather than to Add New Media Such a “setting” has been meaningful since a wonderful new enhancement was added to RM11 where it remembers the last “add media” setting that I used.
Out of an abundance of caution, I always try Select Existing Media first even if know it’s going to fail because this is really a new media file. Which to say, I already have the media path for the file memorized on the Windows clipboard and I paste the path first into Select Existing Media and only then do I paste the path into Add New Media. A good percentage of the time, a Select Existing Media does work for me because the same media file often is tagged to several different items in RM.
I can think of one possible reason for RM supporting what might otherwise be duplicate and wasteful media files. The reason is that if you have duplicate files, each duplicate can have a different caption. I don’t know if this is the reason why the behavior is the way it is, or if the behavior is the way it is because it’s a bug. It does seem strange to me that Add New Media and Drop New Media behave so differently. For example, what if users who prefer to use Drop New Media wanted to have different captions for the same photos when the photos were tagged to different people (for example, group photos).
I agree that there could be some users that have differing media captions based on use and can understand why the RM team might be hesitant to change the current behavior.
My assumption is that the only waste is a duplicate thumbnail in the db and perhaps a row in the MediaTable. (Perhaps bloat is a more accurate label.) Am I thinking of this issue correctly or is there more involved? I do realize that it messes up the media counts in file properties but, unless I am missing something, it’s a misconception to think of the issue as multiple copies of media files taking up disk space.
I agree it’s not a disk space issue at all. Rather, I think it’s a data management issue. For example, I sometimes want to change a media link in RM to point to a different media file. This is supported in the RM user interface and does not require external intervention such as by using SQLite. If I had multiple media links to the same media file, I would have to change each of the duplicate media links.