Shareable Drives media problems

RootsMagic
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Hi all. I’ve finally gotten back to creating Shareable Drives, and am having more issues. The RM9 help file states that “The Shareable Drive will even include your photographs and other multimedia items… When you send the Shareable Drive to a family member, they will see a RootsMagic 9 folder that contains the program and data files…”. Except there are no data files. They don’t copy over. What I get are blurry, illegible and in many cases unopenable substitutes (thumbnails?) that are fairly, and in the latter case completely, useless. I’ve looked at the media files for five or six people in the Shareable version, and about half of these “files” won’t open. Deleting and reinstalling makes no difference.

For example; there are three media “files” for this person on the Shareable Drive:
image

Two won’t open at all:

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And the third is so blurry that it’s useless:

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All three of these are standard jpg files. Am I doing something wrong here?

The drive I’m using is one of your RM 4GB thumb drives which I purchased. The database and media were downloaded via TreeShare. In the full version of RM on my Win10 laptop, the media files display fine.

The full version is installed here:

C:\Users\ME\Documents\Miscellaneous\Home\family\genealogy\RootsMagic Essentials 9

With all media files in:

C:\Users\ME\Documents\Miscellaneous\Home\family\genealogy\RootsMagic Essentials 9\BlahBlahBlah 112523_media

The Shareable Drive exe is in:

E:\RootsMagic-9

With this empty media directory:

E:\RootsMagic-9\Data\ BlahBlahBlah 112523-Media

Oddly, all the media “filename” entries on the Shareable Drive are:

E:\RootsMagic-9\.\Data\BlahBlahBlah 112523-Media

I don’t know what that “.” directory indicates. Is it something hidden?

I’ve tried copying the actual files to E:\RootsMagic-9\Data\ BlahBlahBlah 112523-Media. That fixes the blurriness of the files that will open (i.e., they will expand into sharp, legible versions when clicked on), but the unopenable ones still won’t open. What is wrong here?

Thanks for any help you can provide, and sorry if I’ve been longwinded. I want to give these drives to my kids for Christmas.

1 Like
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I only have created Shared flash drive a couple times – All my media is in same folder on my computer – so I simply copy to folder on flash drive and make sure the setting for media folder is set correctly in program.
Are the thumbnails the issue or when viewing full size image?

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Thanks for your reply. My media is all in the same folder on my computer as well. Could you explain what you mean by “make sure the setting for media folder is set correctly in program”? I don’t understand what you mean here.

All the media files seem to work on the computer, but none of them copy over to the Shareable Drive, which it’s my impression they’re supposed to do.

My questions are, should they copy over or not? And why do so many media files that open on the computer not open on the Shareable Drive even if I copy them over manually?

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First When you make either version of Flashdrive – you need 2nd step to copy all media to one folder on the flashdrive. What ever media folder on the flashdrive (you can change what it is called) you need to manually copy all media from whatever locations on your computer (could be one or many folders depending on you RM Comptuer setup to that folder. Making sure each flash driver matches folder on each flash driver and in the program settings of that flash drive

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1 Like
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When creating the Shareable Drive it will automatically include all the media. You don’t need to set any media folders prior to creating it. All you need to make sure of is that all the media links are active, with no broken media links. When viewing the media it should not have the pink label “Media file not found”. That means the media links are broken.

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Your screenshot made me realize that the “Media folder” path originally created on my laptop by TreeShare is not the same as yours. When I updated that path to where my media folder actually is, and then copied all the media files over to the Shareable Drive manually, they began to work. Thank you!

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For whatever reason, even after the change I made above to the “Media folder” path, the files still won’t copy over during the Shareable Drive install. However, it looks like I have a workaround, which is good enough for now. I’ll play with it more when I get time. Maybe I need to reboot or something – who knows with Windows. Thanks.