I’ve installed Gramps 5.1.6 on my Arch Linux aging 64-bit PC and uploaded my tree (about 2000 people, lots of BMD certificates, travel records, photos, etc). I was hoping to see some of them but from dawn to dusk I’ve tried in vain to get a single picture.
What I get in the gallery is a row (0, 1, several) of little rectangles with red crosses and if I click them, a terminal (kitty). I’ve installed libgexiv2 and python-pillow. I’m baffled by the media manager tool. I succeeded in setting the path for most of the media to the directory where the tree is and for those items I get a thumbnail and activating I do get Pinta, as I want.
But my problem is the ones with red crosses and no path data. Well I managed to set the path data, but instead of all thumbnails they’re aa red crosses now. I’m exhausted now. Try again tomorrow.
I am not a Linux user so always reluctant to wade in. But let’s see if I can help.
You indicate that you uploaded your database. I assume you imported the database. Two questions.
What program did you use to create your database?
What method did you use to move the database into Gramps? Imported a GEDCOM file?
The red X icon indicates that Gramps is not seeing/finding the raw image file on your hard drive. Gramps only stores the path to the raw file. And if the path field is empty it is obvious that Gramps has nothing to use to find the file.
Media Manager only works when the media record’s Path field has information to manipulate.
Your Preferences (menu Edit >> Preferences) can store the Base relative media path. I am on Win10 and mine is c:\users\public\Genealogy\Media. All my media files for Gramps are stored in various sub-folders in Media. Gramps will store only the sub-folders and file name in the media record’s path field stripping out c:\users\public\Genealogy\Media.
Thanks for your response, Dave. By “uploaded” I did indeed mean
“imported”. In fact when I imported the db there was a message box
that said 32000 errors like “line not understood” and I assumed that
might be something to do with the “OBJE @[key]@” and following _type,
_width and what not lines in the gedcom file.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see my tree in apparent working
order. I know that being a text file the gedcom can only store indexes
to media in some collection such as a gallery on AncestryDNA website
(the origin of that tree). Therefore I couldn’t expect to see photos.
However I was hopeful of BMD and Census records and other data in
the public domain having indexes accessible by Gramps. When I upload
gedcom files among online companies like MyHeritage, FindMyPast, etc
these are usually ok and it’s only media I lose. So I started storing
some locally. It’s a question of setting a base pointer in Gramps
preferences and then fine tuning. Hopefully you could set the media
path for a lot of records at one time.
I find however this doesn’t seem to be the Gramps design. Not only
can’t I use any wild card symbols like * or ^ in pattern-matching but
it seems I can only do one at a time. Gramps is probably designed to
build a tree from scratch, rather than manipulate blocs of hundreds of
records. I tried again with an FMP tree (only 10000 lines not
recognised by parser) and once again the repositories include the ones
the BMD records originate from. No way to see them, though.
My sister says I should get “Family Tree Maker” and they
synchronise with Ancestry so you can download your media any time.
Well there was a discussion of gedcomx at one time and I thought Gramps might be using that but I couldn’t import an xml file.
Use the RegEx (Regular Expressions) switch in the Filters gramplet to use pattern matching.
If you want to do changes en masse, you probably want to try out the SuperTool addon.
There are also addon Media tools for resolving paths to media objects on local drives and another for downloading media objects with URLs. (You’ll want to set your “relative media path” in Preferences before downloading.)
Thanks for your advice, Brian: I did try checking the Regex
box but that filter doesn’t seem to have any effect on the media
displayed. For instance I put “O00*” in ID to test whether it would
filter media with ID beginning wiyh O then 2 zeros, but no effect. I
was able to filter citations a bit but it claimed no matches a couple
of times when there definitely were (filtering on ID).
What I don't understand is how this gedcom, which I downloaded
from AncestryDNA, has a whole heap of BMD and Census sources with
different titles, but I can’t see any of these records, not even my
own. In my case I noticed “records not imported into INDI @ID@:…”
and then several lines not understood, all of the form _CRP, _LEFT 8,
etc. When including phantom media, the gedcom depicts them as “OBJE @ID@” followed by several attributes of the form _ABCD [value] and I
guess the underscores don’t parse.
It wouldn't surprise me that Ancestry would be reluctant to
share some sources. Gramps seems to be capable of reasonable charts
with dates but I do like to see these travel records. Still learning
Gramps, thanks for a helping hand, Brian.