Been with RM7 from the beginning. Using TreeShare uploaded entire tree to Ancestry 2 years ago. Now that RM8 is available, downloaded entire tree from Ancestry to RM8 with intent to get RM8 for whole family. Individual media sorting no longer works – but both original RM7 before download and Ancestry Gallery both have always worked perfect. Some of us get left behind as the world moves forward. Progress?
Spent very long time with Tech Support. Dead end.
Situation; I had always named my RM Media Captions beginning with a date like (1998 – John Smith birthday) All 8 thousand consistent. For media view by Person; old RM7 you rearrange media with sort by date and GREAT – in Ancestry you sort A-Z and GREAT. Happy world here.
Issue; Big day comes to pick up with new RM8. Download my entire Ancestry Tree to RM8, Gallery collection by person can no longer be sorted in RM8!! Trapped by advancing technology. So sad.
It’s really not advancing if it’s moving backwards.
I know the staff at RM is working hard to add back all of the RM7 features that were left out of RM8 just so they could release the new version. I’m sure that sooner or later RM8 will at least have the functionality of RM7.
PS; Using Roots Magic for all these years you zero in on what works so very nice. Media attached to a person is a chronological collection of all I had collected - discussions, scanned documents, references, photos, notes and much more. Lost; big screen, clear image (blurry now), sort etc. All OK in Ancestry and RM7. Best wishes Roots Magic.
Have you tried importing the tree on RM7 into RM8 without going anywhere near Ancestry, or via GEDCOM?
From my experience, the issue is usually Ancestry Treeshare.
The problem is; I spent 3 years on Ancestry with massive adjustments waiting on RM8 so have to get the Tree Share from the present Ancestry Tree to start again with RM. RM7 loses it’s previous ability to sort Persons Media when it sees a new Tree Share download from Ancestry. After much effort with Tech Support we lost the battle. I also lost the Ancestry Web Links. I used those links to YouTube to display important videos lost when I uploaded 3 years ago by TreeShare to Ancestry because Ancestry does not support my Person Videos like did RM7.
I’m quite certain that RM8 (or RM9 or RM10, etc.) will always be missing a great deal of important RM7 functionality. Here are some RM7 functionality that I never expect to see in RM8 or its successors.
Pre-RM6 style web pages - the static Web pages. These were long ago listed as deprecated. They won’t be back.
RM6 style web pages. I can’t see them coming back.
Conventional menu bars and tool bars. The RM8 user interface is too radically different to go back. However, I do mention that a vendor as important as Microsoft made such radical changes with Microsoft Office by introducing the ribbon and in Windows 8 by introducing the tiles. Microsoft eventually was forced to back off a bit in both cases. But I doubt that RM will ever go back to anything remotely resembling conventional menu bars and toolbars.
Anything that can’t be supported equally on both a Mac and a PC. And example is GenSmarts support because GenSmarts is a Windows-only program. The GenSmarts thing is not very important in and of itself. But as a Windows user, I find that RM8 does not have the comfortable look and feel of standard Windows apps. Quite the contrary, using RM8 can be very stressful.
Many hotkey and right click combinations. This one is not all or nothing because RM8 does support many hotkey and right click combinations. It’s just that it’s nowhere as many as did RM7. And RM7 did not support as many as did RM3. So RM is backsliding on this one pretty badly, and not just in RM8.
The ability to follow a single person between Views on the People tab and have them remain in the primary position of each View in turn. Instead, RM8, tries to remember the status of each View and return to the previous status when you change to a different View. I find this to be a huge step backwards. It would probably be #2 on my list of RM7 functionality that I would like to have back.
The ability to execute an advanced search which goes quickly to the first person matching the search and then which can go quickly to the next person matching the search without RM first making a complete list of the people matching the search. This would probably be #1 on my list of RM7 functionality that I would like to have back. It usually takes 60 to 90 seconds for my Advanced Searches to complete on RM8 and then I have to go back and forth between what I’m doing and the search list just to go to the next person.
The RM7 functionality that displayed all of a person’s spouses, parents, and children on the screen at the same time in the left side panel. The RM8 way of doing this breaks RM7’s single convenient display into four inconvenient pieces, two of which won’t even stay open when you select them.
Webhints in Descendant View. In RM7, I work heavily in Descendant View set to either 2 or 3 generations when I’m working on Webhints. Working on WebHints in RM8’s Pedigree View or Family View does not accomplish the same thing.
A Family View that showed full birth dates and places as well as full death dates and places for each child and showed them in a nice columnar format. I could probably live without this one by using Descendant View set to 2 generations except for the lack of WebHints in Descendant View.
The ability to see where media items for citations are used by looking at the media list. RM8 forces you to switch back and forth between the media list and the citation list.
The ability to see in Family View that a person has more than one spouse. The information is available in the RM8 sidebar, but only if the person is first highlighted and only if the correct tab is chosen in the sidebar. The information was always available immediately in RM7 without further ado.
That’s a long list of great RM7 functionality that I think will never come back, and my real list of great RM7 functionality that I never expect back is much longer than that. But I think I better stop with a dozen items for now.
I do expect the Publisher functionality from RM7 that can be used to make books to be back eventually. I do expect RM7’s functionality to be able to sort media items for a fact or citation to be back eventually. I do expect RM7’s functionality to be able to see all media items for a person on a single screen to be back eventually. I do expect the ability to print Description fields for facts in Family Group Sheets to be back eventually. I think I expect smooth scrolling in the report viewer to be back eventually, but I don’t have quite as much confidence in that one coming back as some of the others.
So I have only been seeing a small part of the whole picture. But so important to ME because I use the Person Media as a main screen when SEEING my view of my collection for a Person. My original objective uploading to Ancestry 3 years ago; establish a backup to Roots Magic with new Tree Share that my family can get and not lose all I have done. Successful!! They are using the Ancestry App, even in Germany. This has been a good lesson for me because I know none of them would survive the complexity we now have. Changes in Operating Systems and program updates and so on. Sad I miss the opportunity to give them the special features of RM7 in addition to Ancestry as planned. Thank you all for the insight to my next step. I move on to Ancestry. Best wishes.