* Handling of media files in V6.

[ronk]

A Legacy FamilyTree user, trying out Family Historian. Impressive, but have some observations and concerns about media files/links.

The gedcom from Legacy imported quite well, except for media which is linked multiple times. In that case, multiple copies of the media file are created with a filename suffixed with (n) where n is incremented for each additional file. Apparently the import function does not know what has been imported previously. These duplicate media files are all set with a link count = '1' with unique media link id's.

The File Validate routine doesn't appear to check if all media links have media files. In fact, if there the media folder is empty, the validate still indicates no errors. Does one need a plugin to check that?

On the same topic, an media files link count does not increment, if upon finding the missing file, the media window's filename is corrected to an existing media filename already linked elsewhere in the FH database. Also, the original link id is not changed and remains unique.

I realize some of the plugins may help with this, ....will the links work with V.6? I can't try them out unless I purchase the product.

Thanks for any advice.

Ron
Minnesota, USA

[tatewise]

The FH V6.1 due to be formally released soon should fix the multiple Media files problem.

There are Plugins to assist with managing Media, plus FH command Tools > External File Links, and improved import/search options for broken file links in FH V6.1.

[ronk]

Purchased and installed V6.1.4. Yes, over half of the media issues were resolved. Some were not, even though the same media filename, may have had different captions attached to them in Legacy and thus in the imported ged. The others had identical captions and were correctly linked multiple times with only one instance of the file created. A dramatic and welcome improvement. Now the issue is manageable; I simply have to make some manual corrections, or perhaps do some testing to see if my theory is right.

This product is very robust both in feature and responsiveness. As I mentioned in another post, right out of the gate the test export to TNG worked very well, with only some minor tweaking required. Much testing to do yet, but very promising as a 'homebase' replacement for the venerable Legacy Family Tree.

Thanks for responding to both of my posts!

Ron

[ronk]

Another question, possibly a bug? In the Records window, Media tab, using the 'filter' box. Seems to work fine for numeric and text in titles, but '{" or '}' do not. I have these in many of my titles. It is a keycharacter (instead of a keyword) which I used in Legacy FT which then was used within TNG to separate into various collections.

The filter only picks up a few of the many items (over 1000) that should appear.

Shouldn't the filter work for all ANSI characters?

See example pages, before filter, and with filter.

BTW...you'll notice I have my media in subfolders as photos,documents,census and headstones to reduce folder size for maintenance,etc. I used 'work with external file links' to have the links to point to the appropriate folder, and created separate plugins from the 'check for unlinked media' for each of the folders to allow checking unlinks in any of these folders. The two functions worked very well to accomplish this with what I know of FH so far. I had such folders in LegacyFT as well.

Ron

bef filter.jpg (222.11 KiB) Viewed 5257 times

aft filter.jpg (69.51 KiB) Viewed 5257 times

[LornaCraig]

I don't think the filter can pick up a single character unless it is at the beginning of a 'word' or group of characters, or stands alone.

It will not pick up 1635} births because there is no space before the }.
But it will pick up 1635 } births or 1635 }births

[tatewise]

I think Lorna is correct. It is not to do with whether it is a symbol or a letter or a digit, but where it appears in words, I.e. text separated by spaces or punctuation.
On some other tabs there are Options and Help explaining how the filters work. That should make it clearer how filters work by default which is the case for tabs such as Media that have no Options button.

[PeterR]

The Filter Option to Match on: Any Text appears to work only for Source records; I haven't found any Help for this.

[ronk]

Will review filter rules,..just a bit unfortunate it's not a full character filter. I picked those characters back in LegacyFT because less distracting to the viewer, yet provided a good key for TNG collection separation. TNG's filter handles this fine.

Strange, the '-' (dash,hyphen) is found OK even if between characters w/o any spaces. I realize FH has 'keyword' options too. BTW...don't think beginning of characters works either, since have some like {monuments,etc.

Will experiment with an alternative way to do this. A minor inconvenience. I may try having the '}' separated front and back by a space. The items that filtered were like that. I can do a mass find/replace in the title to accomplish that quite easily. I can try that and use the find/replace plugin to do it.

Update: I did the find/replace to the media titles with RJ TextEd instead of the find/replace plugin, because I'm familiar with it. Worked fine! With a space before and after the special character the filter finds it!

Thanks to all for the help!

Ron