I see that images added for a person are just references to some location on my local disk.
This makes them extremely fragile - easy to break path by changing location, name, file extension, etc.
It also makes it hard to share a project with others.
Is there some option / plugin which can embed the binary image data into the same database as other info?
It seems this would be MUCH more user friendly (similar to defaults for most desktop applications)
If only text is supported, it can be base-64 encoded.
And there are built-in tools to resolve paths breaking when you move file around.
Eventually I expect someone will write a report that find all the media object that are NOT within the Relative Media path to create a āmove fileā script. There is already a too to download Media Object that have URL paths.
See the Media Management wiki page. That page needs someone to adopt it & give it some love. (It wonāt be me since I donāt not use the Media feature.)
While it is true having the raw media files stored on the userās hard drive could be a problem, proper file care is easily taken.
One, store your genealogy media in a folder for just that purpose. I store all my genealogy files in my main Genealogy folder in a namedā¦ you guessed itā¦ Media folder. This location is stored in the Gramps Preferenceās Base path for relative media paths. This path allows Gramps to manage files on your hard drive.
When Gramps creates the Media record for an image on your hard drive, it also stores the imageās checksum. With this information, Verify can scour your base media path and locate the image file if you have moved or even renamed it.
I had all my census images in a common Census folder. It got too big so I broke the folder into sub-folders by country and for the US by year. I moved all the images to their new folders and in some cases renamed them. I no longer had to name an image āUS 1880 ā¦ā if that was the name of its folder. Using Media verify, it found all these files and fixed their Gramps path file entry.
One caution for this. If you edit the raw image on the hard drive; crop, resize, etc, the checksums will no longer agree. So before undertaking moving images or renaming them, the function Generate in Media Verify will reset all media checksums. Without checksums agreeing, verify will note that a media file cannot be found based upon its Gramps media path. Likewise, it will find the altered file and note that it is an extra file in the hard driveās media folder.