So the external drive that had all my media on it will not mount so I lost all my media files and nothing is linked properly anymore. When I re-exported my Ancestry media and source files into FamilyTree Maker (in an attempt to get everything linked again), all the files exported with a completely different naming convention. For example, the number (2) at the end of the1900 United States Federal Census(2).jpg previously mapped to a Lewistown, PA census record for my grandfather and showed up on his profile page in RM. But now, every census record exported with a different random number, so the 1900 United States Federal Census(2) still shows up on his page but is for a different random ancestor location in St. Louis, Missouri. I have no way of matching the new files I exported with the correct person since I hadn’t had a chance to add names or any sort of description to the media files. The citations of course don’t match either. This also happened with several other large sources where various pages from the book are numbered in random sequences. Nothing matches anymore. My tree has 7,000 individuals. Does anyone have any recommendations for fixes? I’ve spend a lot of time cleaning up citations in my exported tree to E.E. standards and don’t want to lose all the work I’ve done.
I should add that I’ve purchased Claude AI Pro to try and sort through the mess and AI can’t even help untangle this mess any faster than it would take me to re-export every census record from every person in Ancestry individually and name them properly as I go.
I learn do to a variety of reason - FTM Sync Failures and potential HD failure to NOT let anything else handle media naming. When I left FTM and came to RM – I took over that process.
I manually download, name (Usually a good naming convention that is clear and prevent duplicates) then organize by folder – for me this was by GEDCOM tag / type basciallly.
CENSUS and so on.
Does it seem like more work up front? yes – its it worth in long run absolutely
Note:
“faster” and better longer term are not same question.
What do you mean by GEDCOM tag? To confirm, you went through and downloaded each record from Ancestry manually?
Birth Census DEATH etc = GEDCOM TAG
Here is what I am doing right now. I’ve identified all residence events in FM that do not have a source and am going through and manually downloading each record along with it’s citation data. Does this seem like the right approach, granted it might take me the rest of my life?
Are GEDCOM tags included automatically and attached to each person within the GEDCOM file when exported. I guess I don’t much about how a GEDCOM files looks and what is included -I just follow the instructions and import the file.
I should mention I am on a MAC so not sure if the filing systems behave any differently?
PDF files are very friendly format – if you plan to embed in any HTML or website – maybe not so much if SINGLE Page doc
here is AI summary Attaching media to your genealogy software is a critical decision for long-term organization and preservation. When deciding whether to attach records as PDF files or image files (JPEG/PNG/TIFF) in RootsMagic, each format offers distinct advantages and drawbacks regarding storage, viewing, and citation management.
Here is a breakdown of the pros and cons of each approach within RootsMagic.
PDF Files
Best for multi-page documents (census pages, wills, military files, deeds, and vital record certificates).
Pros:
-
Multi-Page Support: You can store a multi-page document (like a 4-page 1940 US Census record or a lengthy probate file) as a single item in RootsMagic, keeping related pages bundled together cleanly.
-
Text Searchability: If the PDF contains a digital text layer (searchable PDF), you can often highlight, copy, or search for text within the viewer.
-
Document Integrity: PDFs preserve exact formatting, fonts, and layouts across different operating systems without relying on external image stitching.
-
File Size Efficiency: For large text-heavy documents, PDFs can be heavily compressed while retaining high readability for small text.
Cons:
-
In-App Preview Limitations: RootsMagic relies on your system’s default PDF viewer or built-in preview tools. Depending on your setup, viewing a PDF directly within the RootsMagic multimedia tab can sometimes feel clunky compared to instant image rendering.
-
Editing Difficulty: If you need to crop, rotate a single misaligned page, or adjust brightness/contrast quickly, you generally have to open a separate external editing program.
-
Orphaned Links: If you move your master media folder outside of RootsMagic’s direct tracking path, multi-page PDFs can sometimes lose external link bindings if not managed strictly through RootsMagic’s file folder tools.
Image Files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF)
Best for single-page snapshots, photographs, tombstone pictures, or individual document pages.
Pros:
-
Instant Native Preview: RootsMagic renders JPEGs and PNGs instantly inside the multimedia preview window, allowing you to quickly scan records without launching external software.
-
Easy Manipulation: Cropping, zooming, rotating, and adjusting contrast can be done rapidly in almost any basic image viewer before or after linking.
-
Universal Compatibility: Standard image formats are future-proof, universally supported across all devices, and easily read by mobile companion apps or web exports (like GedSite).
-
Granular Tagging: If a multi-page document is split into individual JPEGs (e.g., page 1, page 2), you can cite and tag specific individuals directly to the exact page image rather than the whole file.
Cons:
-
Clutter in Media Lists: A 5-page census record saved as JPEGs creates 5 separate media entries in RootsMagic, which can clutter an individual’s media gallery and make source organization cumbersome.
-
No Text Layer: Standard images are purely visual. You cannot highlight or search for text strings natively within the image file.
-
File Management Overhead: Keeping track of sequential naming conventions (e.g.,
_p1,_p2) for dozens of multi-page records requires strict external file discipline.
Summary Recommendation
-
Use PDFs for: Multi-page documents, official certificates with back-side notes, wills, and extensive military service records where keeping the pages packaged together is paramount.
-
Use Images for: Photographs, cabinet cards, tombstones, newspaper clippings, and single-page records where quick in-app viewing and easy visual adjustments are more important.
simple answer yes but not much
File Path Length and Character Limits (The Biggest Pitfall)
Also if you back media to cloud it can matter there and the media name and filename might matter if too long.
If you bury PDFs or images deep inside nested folders with long names, Windows will eventually throw an error, may cause RootsMagic to lose the link (is my understanding) I do not recall the specifics – means you want to avoid many subfolders
I was referring to use a GEDCOM like tags in the media naming convention (like my screenshot examples)
all above are suggestions and based on my MOO and what I do – you can decide if its right for you and/or combine with other suggestions.
Kevin
“So the external drive that had all my media on it will not mount so I lost all my media files”
The thrust of this thread is (and ought to be) about the best strategy to recover from this problem. But I would like to repeat for the umpteenth time that an external drive should not be the primary place where you store any of your data unless you have a plan for backing up that external drive.
This is grumpy advice from a grumpy old person who worked in IT for 50 years before retirement. So please take the grumpiness of the advice with a grain of salt. But I remember when PC’s first started moving from floppy disks as the only disks the PC’s supported to PC’s which began to support hard disks. And all the advice and best practices were that you had to backup your hard disks. Many users didn’t like the bother of backing up their hard disk, so instead they let the operating system reside on their hard disk and the continued to keep all their important data on floppy disks because the felt that floppy disks didn’t need to be backed up. I kid you not. This is a very true story. Users seemed to have no idea that their floppy disks were just as likely if not more likely to go bad than their hard disks.
Today’s modern equivalent is that users keep their data on an external drive instead of on their computer’s hard drive because of a sense that their computer’s hard drive has to be backed up and their external drive does not need to be backed up. The truth is that all your files need to be backed up, no matter where they are.
adding back in the 90s – two of the ways to back up was burn DVD (or earlier was CDs)
and I had a whopping 250mb tape drive that was amazing fast (sarcasm ). It did the job but NOT exactly reliable.
(Community) One should have multiple backup and locations as well as regular schedule whether manual or automatic
I typically over-backup my files and have never had an issue yet where I’ve needed to resort to my back-up until of course, the one time I didn’t backup first! I am knocking myself over the head now for thinking “oh, nothing will be lost if I don’t have a back-up method for just a couple months”. I usually back-up zipped files of things to icloud, Dropbox, TimeMachine, OneDrive, AND copies on external drives I keep in a safe… just in case! I am so mad at myself because I should know better. 
- For mac users backup is simple. Use 2 rotating time machine drives (1 always connected=hourly; one every 10 days). Also use a cloud service like iDrive ($10/5GB or $100/50GB; much better than BackBlaze).
- As suggested above, manually name your media and organize in nested media folders. I prefer PDFs even though RM is too dumb to handle them without help. Ancestry will download a record find with media AND source/citation with link IF you choose under Print.
- Perhaps your easiest fix is to use the last backup (2 months old) as a new file and look at FTM changes log to see what you did since then to retrace only 2 months of work.
- Never let Ancestry provide downloaded media since files will have meaningless random names. Best of luck.
First, let me say how sorry I am that you’re going through this. It has to be so very frustrating.
If you can’t mount the drive using your own machine, have you considered taking it to a computer repair shop to see if they can retrieve your data? It might not work, and you would have to pay them for their time, but it could be worth it if they are able to recover the data. That’s assuming that the hard drive hasn’t been destroyed by fire, flood, or something similarly catastrophic. Personally, I would do that before i started downloading and renaming media for 7000 people.
Assuming you have tried that, then the other posts here have some good advice. As some other posters said, consider how you want your files organized before you do much downloading. I didn’t lose my files, but decided part of the way into my research that I wanted a different file structure/naming convention so that it would be easy to pass my files on to the next person who takes up this quest.
In my case, I landed on one folder per person that contains all the documents that relate to them. The files are foldered by surname. Women are filed by their birth name. So, it looks something like this:
EASTON
EASTON Cecil 1891-1913
EASTON Eleanor 1917-1989
EASTON etc…
As others noted, there are other ways to group the files. I chose this way because 1) it’s blatantly obvious to the next person how the files are structured and 2) it’s easy for me to pull all the files for a certain person and dump them into Notebook LM, which I use to help translate and cross-check my work.
Hi Mardee,
Yeah, in retrospect I probably should have just paid $600 to see if I could get the drive fixed. I was thinking I could save the money and just redownload the media from Ancestry not realizing everything would be named differently. I had already sent the broken drive back in the mail to exchange it for a new one when I realized it wouldn’t work the way I thought it would.
I actually do have a separate folder of all my own genealogy files I’ve saved for one of my lines. I’ve named everything similar to how you suggest. I have a separate folder for each person within a line. When I initially transferred things to RootsMagic, I thought in order to keep everything linked correctly, I had to keep all my files in one folder and leave the names as is.
Now I realize that I would have been better off just renaming everything upfront so it at least made some sort of sense.
So a couple questions for you:
- Do you just download new files individually from Ancestry via print PDF (including citation). I found this trick awhile back and love it. At this point, I doubt there will be a ton of new files for me to download since I’ve been at this for quite awhile and have very sourced and clean Ancestry tree.
- Do you use the Ancestry tree sync feature at all or is that pointless to use? I looked at it last night and was expecting the interface to me similar to the FamilySearch one, and was beyond confused on how to use it.
I think I am going to take Rooty’s advice and open an old GED file from back in June and compare the old one to the new one. Is there a way to easily copy over some of the newer citation changes I’ve made to my old database?
Thank you all for your tremendous help! Hindsight is 20/20.