Hi, I’ve just installed 8 and opened my old tree from 7 in it. It all looks good, but I’m having trouble with images. Firstly, not all images seem to show on each person. Some appear under the person, some only appear attached to a source, and some seem to be missing.
I picked one I can see in 7 but not 8, and searched for it by name in 8. The thumbnail shows it as the census form it is, but if I click on it, RootMagic opens a totally different image of a marriage registration. It is tagged with two source citations for the marriage so it may be attached to whoever’s marriage it is rather than where it ought to be?
I have not noticed the problem, but if you are seeing these symptoms immediately after a new import from RM7 to RM8, then there is definitely a bug in the import process that needs to be reported and fixed. I’m sure that the RM Helpdesk will need a copy of both your RM7 database and your RM8 database.
I knew how to submit the databases during the RM8 Community Preview, but I’m not quite sure how to submit them now. Maybe just submit your problem without the databases. If they need the databases, they can tell you how to submit them.
Weirdly I tried the multimedia report and it showed that image correctly tagged as a census rather than a marriage.
At the moment I’m taking the opportunity to tidy up my images folder. So I’m moving them all into named folders for each person, and checking they are correctly tagged with name and event. Then I shall try reimporting.
Some of them were added via Ancestry hints and I wonder if that has caused an issue?
I have this problem to, and I hope there is a solution other than resizing all my images! I have both old images that were imported to the new version 8 that dont show up, and new images Ive added to the file – they were fine in version 7 but for version 8 I have been having to pop the image in a different program and reduce the size to about 2x3" on the screen and resave it as filename-small.jpg – then they show up. Not happy about this problem – if I’m scanning images and documents they will be saved to the best quality format I can manage!
I’ve finally come back to this after ages, and wanted to download some images from Ancestry. Every time I try in 7 it says Ancestry is not responding then crashes the whole program, so I opened up 8 again to see if it worked there. Downloaded them with no issues, then went to look at them… They were hidden under several clicks. No media showing under person…No media showing next to the event I downloaded it via… Click on the source, click the sideways arrow, scroll down…there is my image! So it’s quite possible all my images did come over, but were filed under a ridiculously convoluted system next to the source rather than the event it proves.
Actually, I think the way it works is the most logical way for it to work. After all, the image is the real source so it makes sense to file the image under citations. But what I think of as the most logical is really not the most convenient.
This question comes up all the time when users are entering images themselves rather than bringing them down automatically from ancestry. Where should they link the images? To the person? To the fact? To the citation? The answer is the same. Linking images of documents to citations is the most logical. Linking images of images to people or to facts is the most convenient.
But here is another way to think about it, especially when you linking images into RM yourself rather than bringing them down automatically from ancestry. Suppose you link the image to the fact so that the citation doesn’t have the image. Then suppose you Memorize and Paste the citation somewhere else in RM. The other place where you paste the citation will not have the image. But suppose instead you link the image to the citation. Then suppose you Memorize and Paste the citation somewhere else in RM. The other place where you paste the citation will have the image. I think the latter way of doing it really is more logical and is more useful. If an image of a death certificate is cited somewhere in addition to a death fact, it’s really handy to be able to get to the image from that other citation.
That brings us to the question of why linking images to citations has to make access to the images so inconvenient. I thought that gaining access to images that were linked to citations in RM7 was one of the most clicky and most unflat parts of RM7. I was hoping the same thing would be less clicky and more flat in RM8. I guess not everybody agrees, but It seems to me that getting to images that are linked to citations in RM8 is even more clicky and more unflat than it was in RM8.
There is another and related problem in RM8. When you looked at media tags in RM7, you could see all the places a media file was used, all the way down to the person or fact where a citation with a media file was used. When you look at media tags in RM8, you cannot see all the places a media file is used, all the way down to the person or fact were a citation with a media file is used. The display stops at the citation itself without taking you down to where each citation is used. It should be easy to fix that problem, but I don’t think it’s acknowledged as a problem.
I guess what I’m missing is the ability to browse through the images easily, or to check whether I have a particular image. If I want to check if I have downloaded the 1901 census, I have to click through all the steps to see if it’s there. I can’t just open up media and see my neatly labelled pic. Sometimes I want to go back to an image and see what I missed first time. I was looking at a phone book entry earlier and found not just the person I attached it to, but several other relatives in the same image.
I don’t mind if they are attached to people, citations, events… I just want to be able to look at all of someone’s in a single window with an easy click.
I think there are two questions in your most recent message.
I find the easiest way to look for an image is to filter the list of media files by file name. I have highly structured file names, which makes it easy to find. I don’t use RM’s captions for reasons that don’t matter to this discussion. But if you do have captions, you can also filter by the caption. If you don’t have highly structured file names and if you don’t have captions, then file names can be hard to find. A particular example is file names downloaded from ancestry via TreeShare. They have meaningless file names, and therefore can be very difficult to find by file. You have to find them by people instead inside of Edit Person.
If you are looking for all media files for one particular person, such a feature existed in RM7 and does not exist to RM8. It needs to be added to the list of features from RM7 that are not in RM8.
Indeed I do have a lot of images that came via Ancestry, and unfortunately all my captions are designed to work within the individual person view so are meaningless outside of it. When I am looking at a whole page of one person, 1911 census is enough to identify a file. I never thought I’d have to identify them from a thousand others.
I’ve decided my best option is to file all my docs in folders, and browse through the folder if I want to look at everything. It’ll take a while but will be easier long term and means I can look at them without even opening Roots.
Bear with me as I am new to this community. I just watched the webinar on Pictures and Media in RM8 and I might have missed the answer. After fixing the broken media links I see that the file name still references the location of my previous software, Family Tree Maker. Does that simply mean that it is just a name but the image is really in the RM database? If so can I rename the image without loosing it?
If by references the name of your previous software, you mean that the FTM media folder is still showing as the location, FTM insists on copying your media into its own media folder. It isn’t the only program that does this. So I am also guessing you exported a GEDCOM file which you later imported into RM, and as such the media link came along as part of that.
In order to get around this, you can place the media in any folder on your drive, which will break all of the links and you will need to rerun the file linker to fix them. Otherwise, the FTM media folder will forever need to be named as the location if that is where your media live.
Actually FTM does not insist on copying media to one single folder and can be coaxed to use nested folders. FTM links to the media where told to and it’s gedcom just has these media links when you import to RM8. RM8 is great at finding media wherever you tell it so you can use the same media folder as FTM or another. Just change the RM8 media folder setting and use the media fix missing media tool.
Perhaps at this very early bug fixing stage staying with FTM and playing with RM8 is a safer choice. At least on the mac side those uniquely RM8 access violation errors are still intolerable.
Yes, it insists on moving stuff to its own media folder, and yes, it can be gotten around. However too many people accept what FTM wants to do and don’t know enough or bother to change it.
And I didn’t say anything about a single folder, did I? I said it likes to put your media in its own media folder. As in makes a copy of your media…and again, note I said “copy”.
I did run file linker so they are fixed but honestly I don’t know how to find the database based on the path that came with the image. Is it in a RM database or not?
The database has nothing to do with anything at this point. From your previous statement, your images live in the folder where FTM had them. You can place your images where ever you want to put them on your computer. If you do not want them to be in a FTM referenced folder, then copy and paste them to a folder more suited to your preference and run the file linker again, pointed at that new folder. For example if your images show in C:\Smith\Documents\FamilyTreeMaker\Media and you now want them to live somewhere else, create a new folder and copy and paste them. Maybe you want that folder to be C:\Smith\Documents\Rootsmagic\Media instead. Once you copy the media, your would run the file linker and point it to the new folder.
There is absolutely nothing that requires you to move them as long as RM has a correct path for them. Just remember that you don’t want to go and delete the FamilyTreeMaker folder with your images in it.
This is a long thread and my comments may be a little redundant. But it really should be emphasized that RM never stores any media files in its database. It only links to them. It can link to images that are in an FTM folder or that are in an RM folder or that are somewhere else entirely. You can have a specific folder of folders for your media files or you can have them scattered in a disorganized fashion all over your hard disk. It doesn’t really matter to RM. The media files can even be in a removable hard disk or thumb drive if the removable device is attached to your computer while you are using RM.
RM has an option available for default folders for your database, for your backup files, for your report files, for your GEDCOM files, and for your media files. For the first four items, the default folder are very meaningful because they are the default locations where RM will store files of the given type.
In RM7, the default media folder was almost completely meaningless because RM never stored any media files anywhere. You stored them somewhere, and then you told RM where the files were, one file at a time and not one folder at a time. In some ways, the situation with the default media folder in RM8 is similar because RM8 doesn’t put the files anywhere. You put them somewhere, and you tell RM8 where you put them. However, there is a difference in RM8. RM7 stored absolute file paths all the way back to the drive letter, usually but not always C: But RM8 stores relative file paths back to your specified default media folder. That means that if you change your default RM8 media folder after linking in some files, you will be breaking all your media links. If your media files are not under your default media files at the time you link them in, then RM8 links them in more like RM7. The details are more complicated than we need to go into just now for files that are linked into RM8 without being in your default media folder.
If you move or copy images, RM’s Fix Broken Links tool and/or RM’s Search and Replace tool can be used to adjust RM’s media links to point to the new location. But if you rename your images, they will be lost to RM forever even if the file remains in the same folder. There is a trick to get them renamed without them being lost to RM. But unless you are aware of and use the trick, you must never rename any of your media files after you have linked them into RM.
Media files downloaded from ancestry automatically using TreeShare are stored outside of the rest of the RM images. The do not use RM’s default media folder in any way and are in a special folder of their own. But they have in common with the rest of RM’s images that you must not rename them after they are linked into RM unless you rename them with the trick that allows RM to continue to know where they are.
Thank you for your detailed response, it really helped to explain it for my brain. If I follow correctly I can move/rename my FTM media file (which I found, not the images) to something else and then I would need to run the fix broken links tool so that they link up to my file. Right now my images are linked in RM to the old FTM file. Please confirm that I understood this right.
I don’t know what an “FTM media file” is. Is it a single file with embedded images? I doubt it. More likely, it is really an “FTM media folder” containing many many images.
In any case, you can move or copy or rename a folder containing media files that are linked into RM, and Fix Broken Media Links can be used to point to the new name or location of the folder. RM will fix the links one media file at a time. What can’t easily be fixed is if you rename the individual media files themselves. For example, if you rename a JPG file which is a census image, then Fix Broken Media Links will not fix it.
Thank you!