I appreciate, from other posts, that transferring media from Ancestry via Treeshare can create issues. However, that is what I have done and I have found a problem that I now need to rectify.
It seems that everyone in my tree who was recorded in the England & Wales 1911 census has 190 images attached to the Source. RM has attached every image from that census in my tree media file to each person.
I am currently re-labelling and transferring my media files to separate folders on my computer to introduce some order and enable me to find my way around them more easily, as recommended by other users on the forum. A fairly tedious but sensible and do-able task.
However, I am now also faced with removing the superfluous media from each and every record of the 1911 census on my tree. The only way I can see to do that is to highlight each image within the census source for each person and delete it separately. 190 images for each of a few thousand people is a fairly soul destroying prospect.
My question is: is there a way of removing multiple media from a record in one go? Alternatively, is it possible to remove all media from RM records where the media file is not found? Or is there anything else I can do?
I have RM 10.0.5.0 running on an iMac
Any help with this will be very gratefully received. Thanks in advance.
Could use FTM 2019 to download the ancestry tree with media handled much better. I keep my media for each FTM tree organized in nested family folders within a media folder for that tree. This makes it easy to see what is there. RM has only one media folder for all its trees.
I suspect you fell into the trap the developers foolishly created and allowed to persist for far too long with the function “Merge all duplicate citations”. The trap was sealed shut in 10.0.4
Fixed: Merge all duplicate citations no longer merges citations with blank names and fields
Not much comfort if you already fell in. Short of restoring from a prior backup, there’s no easy way to unravel the mess it created from within RM.
I suspect what you have is one citation of that census with 190 (or more) uses and 190 images tagged to it. You need to replace each of those uses with a new citation used once (or more) each. Each of those 190 citations would have one of the 190 images tagged to it. Besides the volume of editing, a big challenge is determining which image is to be associated with which use(s).
On that last point, if this database was derived from a TreeShare download, does the Ancestry Tree still exist? Perhaps a fresh download to a new database could tell you which uses should be associated with each image. The image filenames should be the same.
Tom’s analysis is surely the correct one. I agree that the best solution in your case might be simply to download your entire Ancestry tree to a new RM database from scratch.
That being said, I’m in the camp that downloads media files from Ancestry manually and who uses TreeShare only for WebHints. I give my media files meaningful file names and I organize my media files into a meaningful sub-folder structure. But the way I do it is a lot of extra work. I totally understand the appeal of just letting TreeShare do its auto-magical thing and letting TreeShare do the dirty work for me behind the scenes instead of me doing all the extra work.
Users do seem to report success in using TreeShare’s automatic downloading and still they rename their media files meaningfully and still they reorganize their media files into sub-folders meaningfully. I have never been able to picture how to work that way. It has always seemed to me that the only way to let TreeShare do all the work is to let TreeShare do all the work without dabbling with renaming and reorganizing their media files. Perhaps users who do work that way could describe their process for us.
I understand why people resist the manual work and effort. I left FTM and Ancestry do its thing for over 17 years. After too many failed syncs I decided it was worth the additional small effort.
I download manually and rename before attaching to anything. (or adding to RM Media gallery). Also normally use Drag N Drop method. Probably similar to what Jerry does. One of the main things TreeShare does is to dump all media in a folder with same name as the Database file.
Thank you for explaining how this happened, Tom. That is really helpful. Knowing that I caused it by “merging all duplicate citations” rather than it being a Treeshare issue does at least mean I can remove all the images from each individual census fact by deleting the source and then adding it back. Still a lot of work but a little less time consuming than the alternative. I have just added a 1911 census fact to someone in Ancestry, run Treeshare and, sure enough, there is just the one correct image in RM. Unfortunately, Treeshare doesn’t seem to spot that a source is missing from RM and prompt to add it so it will have to be a manual process.
This does go to show that I need to be careful of blindly running tools that I don’t really understand. I just tend to run through all the tools every now and then on the assumption that they have been added by people who know far more than I do and will tidy things up but I have never actually got to grips with citations for example. As far as I was concerned they were a rather complicated and arcane labelling system that existed in the background when I added a source (usually from Ancestry). When I got evidence from elsewhere I would just add a note along the lines of “I got this from Norfolk Bishops Transcripts 1500 - 1900 on FindMyPast”. Perhaps I need to take some time to properly understand this stuff.
For people just starting out in genealogy (and sometimes for more experienced users as well), citations are the hardest thing to get a handle on. The most official authority on citations is surely a book entitled “Evidenced Explained”. It’s over 800 pages long, and it makes it seem like you need a Ph. D. in citations before you can do any genealogy. Opinions are frequently expressed in genealogy forums to the effect that surely there is a better way.
Ancestry itself offers one such “better way”. It helps you find sources in the form of images of documents - all kinds of documents. After you and Ancestry together have found such documents, Ancestry makes it easy for you to create a link from an event such as Birth or Marriage to that image. Ancestry sometimes even makes it easy to create additional events for you, such as when a census record includes enough information about a person’s marriage that Ancestry can create a Marriage event for you.
By contrast, a citation is a footnote that is printed at the bottom of the page in printed reports. The footnote is intended to include enough information to allow anyone using the printed report to find the source document again. But a footnote is not formatted as a link such as can be used by a Web browser. Rather, a footnote is formatted for use by a human being.
As long as you work only in Ancestry, you really don’t need to worry much about citations. Those links that Ancestry creates between events and source images effectively become your citations. There are no “footnotes at the bottom of the printed page”. You just click on the links, and you see your source images.
When you download source information from Ancestry to RM using TreeShare, the download process does its best to create an acceptable citation in RM in addition to downloading the source image to RM. Sometimes this process works very effectively. But sometimes this process works very poorly where it does download the source image but where it leaves the needed citation fields blank. These are the citation fields that RM would need to print an acceptable footnote at the bottom of the printed page. And these are the citations in RM that became merged in your RM database even though they referred to different source images. This is the problem that has bitten you and which appears to have been fixed in RM 10.0.4.0.
The problem really originated in Ancestry with the way it indexed the 1911 Census for England and Wales. Most data collections in Ancestry do not have this problem, but some do. The issue does not seem to be a problem as long as you stay inside of Ancestry, but it becomes a problem when your data is transferred outside of Ancestry.
This does not help you solve your problem, but perhaps it might help you understand it. If I were in your shoes and if my data in Ancestry was in really good shape, I might consider abandoning what I have in RM and simply downloading from Ancestry into a new RM database.
Thank you for that, Jerry, that is helpful. I am a bit reluctant to download everything from Ancestry again, having done it once before to get rid of a phantom person in RM. I’m sure it would solve this problem but I would then have to sort out all the place names in RM, splitting out the place details and correcting others from Ancestry that don’t conform to the RM standard that I’ve now established because I added them to Ancestry years ago when I wasn’t as rigorous as I usually am now. That might involve less work but I think I’ll leave it for the time being and see how I get on.
Not to say it’s a better way, but there is a website that helps build citations: https://cite-builder.com/
I personally build my own manually, based significantly on Evidence Explained guidance. But the site above is a tool for those that might prefer something automated.
Bearing in mind that I am coming from a position of ignorance, I have just visited the Cite Builder website and watched a couple of their videos. It appears to be an excellent website and a great set of tools, ideal for someone like me. Thank you Kimberley