I have inherited a huge file from my mother who has worked on her and my father’s genealogy for years. I inherited lots of media: photos, documents, scans of vital papers, etc. Before her recent death, I have amassed a massive file of photos (about 20K) and some of them could possibly be linked to a person in my RootsMagic file.
Before I start linking media items to people, I need to know how you organize your media files. Do you have one big media folder with everything in it? Do you organize them based on the type of record (such as photos, birth certificates, documents, etc.) Or do you organize by surname? I’m a little skeptical of that, but if you think it’s the way to go, tell me why. I tend to lean toward organizing them by record type, but I need some info from more experienced genealogists than me.
I use a similar scheme for spouse’s side (but all in the same Media master folder).
The advantage of using different name orders between Photos and Documents is that for photos containing multiple people, it is less confusing as there are commas only between the peoples’ names.
My sense is that most users do it either mostly by surname or else they do it mostly by record type (like all marriage records together, all birth records together, all obituaries together). I’m not sure that one way is better than the other. My system is a little bit of a hybrid in that I do it primarily by record type, and then I include both the record type and the person’s name in the file name.
I’m not a Mac user, so I can’t speak to Finder on a Mac. But as a Windows user, I find the Windows capabilities to search by file name to be very inadequate. So I supplement my use of Windows File Explorer by also using a free file management tool called Agent Ransack. It’s a bizarre sounding name, but it’s a very powerful and easy to use file searching tool. For example, I can search on smith AND marriage or on smith AND marriage AND jpg - things like that. But the trick to good searching if this sort is to have good quality file names.
My census records are organized a little differently. They are by state and county and year. That’s because so many of my census images have multiple families on the same census page and I don’t want to repeat an image for each family on the same page.
Personally I don’t think it matters providing that you have all the photos/images in separate folders on your computer - you can always search for them in their folders providing that you have named the individual images appropriately. This will enable searches on names, birth cert, marriage cert, death cert, [year] census, military, etc. Media is not embedded into RM but is a link to the media folder - being lazy I just have the one!
If you have several or many media folders and these media files inevitably end up in a single media folder during the transfer, you might run into the problem of duplicate filenames, such as “our_father.jpg.”
If, during GEDCOM transfers, you have to load the GEDCOM file first and then the actual media files (as is the case, for example, when importing into TNG), this can be tedious if you have many media folders.
I posted about my method a few years ago. It started as a reply to someone’s thread and then got forked to its own posting. My method hasn’t changed since the posting. Here’s the link …
I have a folder that separates my main family media from my Roots Magic Media e.g. Family History | RMMedia . RMMedia contains copies of files for RM genealogy only e.g. lossy lower resolution .jpg. This is structured similarly to Kimberley’s ( no surprise as I was inspired here ). I do separate into top-level parents family names from the root (me) as I am researching down both my paternal and maternal history. I actually replicate the RM folders and one from RM databases too.
In a folder FamilyHistoryMedia, I keep master copies and older family items such as parents, grandparents etc. Master copies I scan in to archival standards e.g. lossless TIFF files unless downloaded as .jpg. The genealogy master copies such as birth certificates are in the same folder structure as RM.
In short I am aiming to record my old family documents separate from genealogy specific e.g. birth certificates; master document separate from working documents e.g. RM and use archival standards as far as possible.
My file naming is possibly too complicated but this folder structure works well for my needs.
That’s an interesting point. I didn’t think of having multiple people in the same photo. In my main photo file I just use tags. What do you do for photos of more than a handful of people in them? For instance, I have an old family photo with about 2 dozen people in it.
This has been discussed a lot if you do a search. Personally all my files (BMD, census, photos, etc) go under couple folders (ie. parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc) and use a specific naming convention that works for me surname,firstname_bYYYY_cYYYY_filetype_location_note). You are smart to stop and think about what you want to do before embarking on 20K worth of files. I would suggest you try out a sample of your files with what ever you decide before jumping in and changing them all Good luck.
There are a lot of really good suggestions here. One thing I try to do is to use a name that goes from largest to smallest. E.G. UnitedStatesCensus1910_BaltimoreMd_SmithJohn I try to do this with all documents. My directory names are just like several of the suggestions only under a single Genealogy directory. \Genealogy\family name\surname (Date if needed)
I have nearly 30GB of photos and documents so I know the frustration of trying to keep it all in order. Have fun
When I first set up my RootsMagic database, I set up a filing system in my Genealogy Documents folder under Surname. File folders within were by birth-death years and full name of the FATHER. I stored notes, media, everything I had that way. Unfortunately, every time I upgraded to a new RM (I started with RM 8 and am now using RM 11), a huge number of my media links would break and I’d have to go in and reconnect them manually. Now, I still have folders by Surname for notes, maps, etc., but I have ONE media folder for RM-11 Media where I put ALL media. For example, when I download media from Ancestry.com, I save it to the RM-aa Media folder and then set up the link in RM to the fact I want.
As far as file naming goes, after much trial and error, now I tend to be pretty simple: A letter for a document type (BR for birth, Bap for baptism, MR for Marriage Record, Photo for photograph) followed by the individual’s full name-and the individual’s unique identifier number assigned by RM.
That said, there really is no “right” way or “wrong” way. Good luck!
It’s water over the dam by now, but that really should not have been the case. Do you have any kind of sense of what was causing the problem. And do you anticipate facing the problem again when you move someday to RM12. Or do you suspect that your one media folder system has solved the problem once and for all?
This is such a common problem that I wish there were a really good tutorial on how to avoid it. RM’s only solution seems to be to “run the ‘fix broken links tool’”, but I think there needs to be something better than that.
It happened when I went from RM 8 to RM 10 and again to RM 11. But I suspect that I will see the same thing when I go to RM 12 – just fewer broken links. The weird thing is that not all the links in my separate documents file break. Just some. I haven’t been able to figure out the pattern. One “oops” on my part I DID figure out was that some of the media I was saving to my computer and then dropping into RM were in my “Downloads” folder (because I spaced out and wasn’t paying close attention…I know better)… so when I deleted my downloads folder, poof, the links were all gone. Fortunately, I was able to find some of these media in my back up media…and some that I had posted or were posted to Ancestry, so I was able to rebuild. Needless to say, the more I use RM, the better my processes get.
A great deal depends on the site from which you are downloading. But I very much prefer sites which do not simply download to the Downloads folder. Rather, I prefer sites that ask me where to download, and I can then specify a folder and filename of my choice. So often it’s not just the Downloads folder which defaults on downloads, it’s often also the filename.
That being said, here is something you could do right this second that would be very easy to check. Simply go into RM’s Media tab and type download into the search box. That search box is pretty powerful, and it searches not only the file name but also the entire folder path which includes all the folder and subfolder names associated with all your files. That should tell if you have any files currently linked into RM that are in the downloads folder.
Oops, before posting this, I decided to ask an AI if there was a way to change this behavior so that I can always specify folder names and file names on browser downloads. According to the AI, all the mainstream browsers have such a setting under Settings. I have not yet tested, so I don’t want to say much more about it until I’m sure of how it works. But in the meantime, I’m puzzled that using the default browser settings, some sites already do it the way I want and some sites default to the Downloads folder. The AI claims that if I change the setting in the browser that it will override the settings from the site. But again, I’m not going to accept that claim myself without further testing.
Also “Show downloads when they’re done” gives an icon top right of screen (after you have downloaded a file) that lets you either open the folder to which it was saved or to open the file itself. CNTRL + J opens a full list of all your downloads and allows you to view either them or their folder (even strikes out any you have deleted). Not sure about other browsers.
Thanks Jerry. I have concluded that I really need to “just pay close attention to what I am doing.” Sounds simple enough, but like playing tennis…it is harder to “keep your eye on the ball all the time” than one might think!
Good luck.
