On the Subject of Treeshare and Media.
I download a Tree from Ancestry to my Roots Magic Version 9 and over a period of time I lose a few photos from said Tree.
I then open the Tree and update the Tree data using my Roots Magic/Ancestry update function (the small Ancestry logo at the bottom).
Does Roots Magic update the missing media files on my PC from Ancestry during this process or do I have to execute the “fix missing media” function for Roots Magic to locate the missing Media on my PC to keep RM in perfect sync with my Ancestry Tree?
The scenario you describe is puzzling.
When you are not using Ancestry and TreeShare, you gather your media files yourself as a manual process. You name the media files whatever you want to name them, and you store them in whatever folders you wish. Finally, you tell RM where they are and what they are called by linking them into RM. The files are never actually stored in RM.
Such files can become lost or their links can become broken by things like the files being deleted from your hard disk or by the files being renamed on your hard disk or by the files being moved from one place to another on your hard disk. RM itself is not the cause of such actions. Rather, it is the victim of such actions.
But with TreeShare, it is TreeShare that is deciding where to put the media files and what to call them. The files are all placed in one large folder without any subfolders, and the files are assigned meaningless names. The files are still linked into RM instead of being stored in RM. If you rename or delete or move any of the media files that were put there by TreeShare, then TreeShare would be the same kind of victim as I described in the previous paragraph. But it’s hard to see how such things would be happening, especially just to an occasional individual file.
Are you sure you aren’t deleing or renaming or moving any of the media files downloaded by TreeShare? Such files will be stored in a folder which is stored in the same folder as your RM database. The folder will have the same name as your RM database with the string _media appended to the name.
Is your RM database in a folder that is synced to the cloud such as a Dropbox folder or a Google Drive folder or a OneDrive folder?
1 Like
Thank you for your input. I mistakingly thought that when a RM data file was updated from Ancestry via the Tree Share function, that it would also check for and download any missing media that the file had links for, but were missing in the data base on RM.
I have a program which very efficiently merges gedcoms which I shall now use to merge a number of gedcoms and then use the “relinking function” in RM to find and reconnect all the missing media.
Many thanks
As you have now observed, TreeShare is checking for files in Ancestry that don’t already have links in RM. TreeShare does not check for files in Ancestry where the links do exist in RM but the links are broken in RM.
I’m still puzzled about how your links are becoming broken in RM.
One of the reasons I started out with genealogy (many, many years ago) is that it allowed me to also dabble in some of my other passions - spreadsheets, formulae and databases, back when it was all about microfiche and the IGI.
In the 80’s I was introduced to analytics with my employment and it took off with Brothers Keeper and PAF on my PC with my new found hobby of family history.
Ancestry came a little later and now in my retirement it is all consuming.
Programming was never my forte and now with amazing programs like Roots Magic I can simply come back and download the Tree + Media again.
The media is a bonus - I am usually more interested in the data but although the media on Ancestry comes in handy for display, I usually just download the Gedcom