* FTM to FH Media Import

[NickiP]

I'm helping a friend who is looking to migrate from FTM2012 to FH5 and has a number of media files linked to individuals in FTM. These are media manually added to FTM and not downloaded from ancestry. When I've tested this for her (as she is not very computer literate) exporting a gedcom from FTM2014 (which doesn't appear to be much different from 2012) to FH6, the media records have imported against the individual but are missing a Title in the Media Item properties.

The gedcom prior to import into FH shows the following entry:

0 @M12@ OBJE
1 FILE C:\Docs\Genealogy\Haydon (London)\Census\1861 Census\james and ann ebbs nee norman born 1831 enfield.jpg
2 TITL james and ann ebbs nee norman born 1831 enfield
0 TRLR

However, when the gedcom is validated in FH, you get the following error message against that entry:

Record Type=Media. Gedcom Id=M12. Record Number=12.
l.12639 - INFO ONLY: Loaded uncategorised data (non-GEDCOM): "2 TITL james and ann ebbs nee norman born 1831 enfield"

Is there anyway of persuading FH to use the media file title to create the Media Item Title field? At least this would allow her to avoid having to amend all media transferred across from scratch.

Thanks

Nicola

[tatewise]

Yes, use a plain text editor such as Start > All Programs > Utilities > Notepad and in the Gedcom file replace every 2 TITL with 1 TITL and ensure the Match case option is ticked.

Theres is also a problem with the Media Record Id defined by line:
0 @M12@ OBJE
and all the references to to those Media Record Id.

So you need to replace every @M with @O
where that is 'space at letter M' repalced with 'space at letter O'.

BUT before all that, check how_to:import_from_family_tree_maker|> Import from Family Tree Maker (FTM) to ensure the Gedcom is being created correctly because that Media problem has not been mentioned before. There are also other cleanup operations needed for Notes, etc.

If you still get the Media problem that fix described above needs to be added to our Knowledge Base.

[NickiP]

Thanks Mike, the only difference with the instructions in the Knowledge Base was that by default FTM2014 defaults to UTF8 as the character set, not ANSI. I've just rerun the export, but got the same result:

0 @M12@ OBJE
1 FILE C:\Docs\Genealogy\Haydon (London)\Census\1861 Census\james and ann ebbs nee norman born 1831 enfield.jpg
2 TITL james and ann ebbs nee norman born 1831 enfield
0 TRLR

Theres is also a problem with the Media Record Id defined by line:
0 @M12@ OBJE
and all the references to to those Media Record Id.

So you need to replace every @M with @O
where that is 'space at letter M' repalced with 'space at letter O'.

Prior to opening in FH, I replaced the 2 TITL with 1 TITL (but didn't replace the M with the O at that point), this does then allow the Media Item Title to import properly.

For my own curiosity, can I ask what the "M" and "O" are in this situation please?

[tatewise]

Record Cross-Refs in GEDCOM must be unique so that say a Multimedia tab can uniquely identify a Media Record.

FH and most other software use Record Id for that purpose where an initial letter identifies the Record Type followed by a unique number.
So in FH @I29@ identifies the Individual Record Id 29, and @F42@ identifies Family Record Id 42.

FH uses @O63@ to identify Media Record Id 63 whereas FTM appears to use @M63@, so it would be best to convert from FTM to FH format, but I have just experimented with a Gedcom that used @M throughout and FH was happy with it, and retained the Record Id numbers, and when Saved it convrted to @O format. Thus you don't need to perform that edit.