Unexpected Error: "Instance of "Tabulmage" not created" - RM9

Thanks, Tom. As soon as I am approved for the Facebook group, I will check this out!

I submitted a support request March 13 and Jackson responded March 14. It was request #123642.
“We are aware of this TabuImage error and working to find the solution. What operating system version do you have and what version of FTM are you using? What destination format did you set from FTM on the gedcom?”
I gave Jackson my information.

So while it’s not a widespread problem, neither is it an isolated one.

I had to recover a RM9 corruption by restoring from a backup. After restoring, all the media links were broken (as expected) and I dutifully ran the fix links tool, immediately exited from RM9, came back in and hey presto received the Tabulmage error reported here. By trial and error I found that fixing the media links was the cause of this problem, and further it was a problem only after I restored the media folder that contained all the primary people images. So I repeated the restore process, but after fixing the media links but before exiting RM9, I opened a few images (not the thumbnails) of people’s primary image. My Mac showed some strange displays of the person image but after 15 seconds settled down and showed the person image as expected. Then when I came back in to RM9 there was no Tabulmage error !! It looks as if you have to let the Mac/RM9 adjust to the new person images and then it knows what to do in future.

Anyway - just thought this might help others if they get hit with the dreaded Tabulmage problem.

I wish I could test using your file, but I don’t know how I would do it without the images.

Tabulmage error received on my Mac running latest OSX and latest RM9. Here’s how I finally fixed the problem with the help of Jackson in RM tech support.

Continued. FIX: rename all media files to eliminate special characters. Rename the media folder, Rename the main database RMtree. Start RM9, open the database, publish multimedia report, use report (in excel) to correct naming conventions in media link inside RM., and finally run Fix media links. Use tools to rebuild, compact, and correct phantom records. Yes it took all of the above to eliminate the error and get running properly. Detail: I did most of corrections using excel Duplicate conditional formatting and using formula to find special characters for via internet search.
Hope this works for you.

Thank you, Rich. This is all a bit overwhelming for me - who hasn’t used any software for genealogy except Ancestry online. I guess I need to step back and figure out how to start again with RM9.

Or check out some competing programs. You should pick the software that best fits your way of working. That may be RM, Family Historian, FTM or another. Most of these have trial packages available.

It’s worth investigating up front instead of a year down the road.

Based on the responses that others have shared one simple thing you might try is to look at your media file names and the names of the folders that contain your media to check for non alphanumeric characters such as ( , ’ , *, $, etc. Rootsmagic uses several of these special characters when storing the file path details in the multimedia table and it makes sense that this could create problems if the same characters appear in the file or folder name. If you use special characters in your folder or media file names, hopefully there’s not lots of them and it might be worth following the steps in the fix @rich_holden_1 posted. Perhaps someone could help you to rename everything if you’re not comfortable with it.

I hope this is not hijacking the thread, but another special character that can sometimes cause problems in file names is blanks. I recently had reason to use TreeShare to download another user’s Ancestry tree to which I had access.

I don’t know the why’s and wherefore’s, but every filename downloaded with the tree was packed with blanks. The files were downloaded to a folder under OneDrive and OneDrive does not support blanks in file names. OneDrive offered to replace all the blanks with underscores for me, and doing so would have broken all of RM’s media links. And by the way, OneDrive is about as mainstream as it gets these days when it comes to Windows computers.

It may be just because I started using computers in the mid-1960’s when the characters that were legal in file names were very restrictive. But I have never put anything into file names except letters, numbers, and the occasional underscore. That strategy has alway served me well. Lots of special characters will work just fine 99% of the time. And you can say that you use special characters in your file names all the time and you have never been burned. But that 1% of the time when special characters in file names fail can be a real killer.

It is only leading or trailing spaces that OneDrive cannot handle. It works fine for me with a file name such as 1950 Census (US)_
Restrictions and limitations in OneDrive

1 Like

Yes it does - well at least it does on my computer!

Hi Rich My RM9 crashes after the tabulmage error so that I can’t start RM9. Does the program run after renaming the media folder and the main database? Are all the tools that you mention part of the RM9 program? I’d be very grateful for any more help you can offer.

Keith,

Sorry for the delayed response.

The manner in which I corrected the issue.

  1. rename the main database. This allows RM9 to start without a database.

  2. open the dB from inside of RM9

  3. under MEDIA tab choose dropdown for SEARCH AND REPLACE.
    a) Look for and replace all special characters. # , $ double… Commas double spaces parentheses ( ) { } ! *

  4. I use a Mac computer.
    In FINDER highlight all file names under the MEDIA directory.
    Choose RENAME from the FINDER File menu
    Now repeat 3 a) above to replace special characters in the names of files on the hard drive.
    You have now replaces SPECIALs inside of media portion of RM9 and replaced the characters on your computer.

  5. choose TOOLS menu and (at bottom of list) choose enhanced properties, RUN.
    Check under MEDIA on resulting report and work through any problems that MAY still exist.

A help may be to PUBLISH the Multimedia List report and look through it. I saved the report as CSV (Comma separated values) and used EXCEL to search for issues.
If using Excel, you can Google Find SPECIAL CHARACTERS in Excel.

Without knowing your operating system or your experience level, the above is a shot in the dark at helping.

Please, let me know if I can help further , or clarify.

Rich.holden@me.com

JULIE,
Sorry for the delayed response.

The manner in which I corrected the issue.

  1. rename the main database. This allows RM9 to start without a database.

  2. open the dB from inside of RM9

  3. under MEDIA tab choose dropdown for SEARCH AND REPLACE.
    a) Look for and replace all special characters. # , $ double… Commas double spaces parentheses ( ) { } ! *

  4. I use a Mac computer.
    In FINDER highlight all file names under the MEDIA directory.
    Choose RENAME from the FINDER File menu
    Now repeat 3 a) above to replace special characters in the names of files on the hard drive.
    You have now replaces SPECIALs inside of media portion of RM9 and replaced the characters on your computer.

  5. choose TOOLS menu and (at bottom of list) choose enhanced properties, RUN.
    Check under MEDIA on resulting report and work through any problems that MAY still exist.

A help may be to PUBLISH the Multimedia List report and look through it. I saved the report as CSV (Comma separated values) and used EXCEL to search for issues.
If using Excel, you can Google Find SPECIAL CHARACTERS in Excel.

Without knowing your operating system or your experience level, the above is a shot in the dark at helping.

Please, let me know if I can help further , or clarify.

Rich.holden@me.com

Rich

Thanks very much for all this extra information. I ran RM8 with a previous backup to identify where my media files were stored and then did a batch find and replace rename on those folders. I only replaced the special characters that I could see in the filenames and it seems to have worked so far. I can now run RM9 with my latest datafile and all my photos seem to be intact, but that only represents about a third of my media files and the remaining broken links weren’t fixed so there’s still work to do and your suggestions will help a lot.

I use a 2017 iMac running MacOS Ventura v13.3.1 and I’ve been using computers since 1971, although there’s always more to learn …

Keith

Keith, Unfortunately I have been given the ‘Opportuniy’ to re-visit the “Tablumage error”. My experience indicates Tabulmage is RM speak for table of images. Actually, there are only links to images. Thus, when you get Ancestry, including garbage files and partial downloads, you get bad images files.
You should carefully review ALL MEDIA from Ancestry in FINDER before proceeding with RM9.
First, clean all the files names by removing extra spaces and all Special Characters. Second, right click in Mac FINDER (similar to Windows Explorer) and Quick Action ‘Create PDF’ from finder. Finally, inside of RM9 change the media filename to correspond to the cleaned name and extension of PDF rather than JPG. This FIXES the problem.
Hopefully, this helps the next person researching the issue.

“TabuImage” error is not exclusively RMspeak but it may be exclusive to Macs. I think the “tabu” is a homonym for “taboo” meaning something along the lines of “forbidden”. You could be on the right track with your guidance on what to do.

Important to stress that the RM user needs to keep track of each original file path and name linked to their database if they proceed to change them so that the link record can be found in RM and updated.

Tom,
You are CORRECT.
Hope the info provided helps users!

RM Community is a great idea.
Amazing when people complain about 19th century pricing in the 21st century.
Hope they don’t find out what 21st century American politicians are doing to real prices.
Bet they think phonograph records and non-download software still sold.
It gives whiners a forum and solution providers a voice.

Thanks, again
Rich

Genealogy without patience is just record keeping.