Would it make sense to allow folders to exist inside of each Gallery? The change would allow the end user to group pictures relative to each other by year or event or similar reasons. An example that I just ran into would be to have a group called school pictures…
This is be hugely helpful from an organization standpoint.
As a follow up, there is another way to handle this that might be more acceptable.
Leave the current Gallery as is, but add the ability to have a tab on a per Person/Family/Place called “Local” that can point into the local file system at a sport where documents related to that entry exist. That would allow users to group documents that don’t quite fit into the system to have a single point of access into the file system. It could be a simple file system browser.
As an example, I’m starting to build out my outside data store and it looks as such"
/home/gramps/media
–“Family Name”
– --“Given Name”-“Birth Year”
– -- --Census
– -- --Events
– -- --Land
– -- --Military
– -- --Other
– -- --Photos
– -- --Tax
– -- --Writings
Inside each of the above folders, I’m placing the documents that I refer to inside of Gramps. What I’m suggesting is to have a tab that points to a configurable place. For my use, I could point it to /home/gramps/“Family Name”/“Given Name”-“Birth Year” for each person. This would allow fast access from inside gramps to that structure. It would also reduce the need for pointers internally.
Drawbacks that I can initially see are mostly caused by future relocation requirements. If someone moved the location of their media store, the design could be clumsy when relocating the tabs. It would be necessary to touch each individual entry to change the targeted directory. On Linux this would be easy to handle, but much more difficult on Windows.
The other drawback that I see is there would be no structure for references. If that is mandatory, then I fall back to the initial proposal.
Any thoughts?
You are free to choose any folder structure for your media objects.
An enhancement like this is not something I would need. I do not aggregate all images associated with a person in their Person gallery tab. That tab contains only their photos. As much as possible, any other images would be placed in the gallery tab in the event, citation, etc where appropriate.
Likewise, all images are stored together by what they are not to the person. All Births, Deaths, Census, etc images together in the same folders.
That said, you may try to do a personal hack of the code.
The “Pointer” you want is already built in. The ADD (+) in the Gallery tab. Right now, choosing this option opens the Select a Media Object in the last accessed folder which is stored in your gramps.ini file. An idea for the hack would override the last accessed folder to a folder based upon the person’s ID number (as an example).
The coding to try to make this hack is beyond my pay grade. I only offer the concept of something that might meet your needs. And of course, any personal hack would need to be coded into new versions of gramps as they are released.
Thank you. I’ll look at it.
It would be nice if custom filters in the Media category view could use filters based on persons, events, and places. Then we could work with any definable subset of images without regard to how they are organized in folders.
The other day I looked at the PersonEverything Report
It lists everything that makes up a person’s record.
So for instance having a Media filter that would all those same media files? The same for Notes? Places? Citations?
The Person Citation in the list view has all the citations linked with the person and their events and media (and maybe a few others that I have not added citations). So this may/probably can handle this need.
HI DaveSch,
If I’m being dense, please excuse me.
I think we must have our data ordered differently. My Top Level “Source Citations” tab is empty. All of my citations are attached to the specific document that they reference and it doesn’t appear that they roll up to the top level.
If I’m understanding you correctly, we would need to assign a metadata tag to each photo or document to allow us to select just that subset of the pictures or documents? That could work and would make sorting more flexible. It would be similar to the way that Gmail appears to sort email into folder. Is that what you are proposing?
Regards,
Terry
Workaround:
You can do this in Gramps today by using Notes and the internal linking/reference function…
this format works for Windows “file://full path to folder or file”.
You need to change the “http://” to “file://” and then add the full path to your file or folder…
If you point it to a folder, it will open the folder when ctrl+click on the text…
in one Note you can have multiple links if you like…
And you can do the same on the media, but linking to persons of the media is attached to a source, just create a Note for the Media, Write the Name of the person select the full name and click on the “link Icon” to create the link…
This Note can be added to all media that reference people or Events even if the media itself are added to a source…
This way it is possible to cross reference lots of things in Gramps…
In a Person View list, the bottom bar Citation tab gramplet will list any citation for the person. This includes citations attached to Person, Events, citations on any media, I seem to remember if there is a citation on a place this will also be included in the list.
It was this functionality that @GeorgeWilmes talked about for a media filter.
ok. That’s similar to what I do now. For example, I add the picture to a gallery using the file path as you described earlier. Then I add a source citation so it’s contained by the picture. If I need the picture anywhere else, I use the same path and copy the citation ID to the new entry.
You’re right that my approach adds one level of redirection, but it puts the data that I want to see up front.
The reason that I choose this approach is that the citation is below the document. That is when I look at the view in gramps, I always see the document first, then if I want the Source/Citation, I just need to click down one level. Is it the right way? I don’t know, but it seems to be the most logical approach that I’ve come across so far.
I just saw your last response…
The only issue that I have with using citations for grouping is that there is no flexibility… that I can see at the moment. For example, the photos that I’m pulling are are coming from a very large repository. This leads to 1 issue. The first one I’m still looking at and that is the name of the document is the same as the name in the repository. I’m trying not to rename everything, so the the names don’t mean much to the typical viewer… Everything within the repository, is presented in the same group, even thought there are multiple citations.
I need to think about this some more. The presentation is important and it’s not quite what I’m shooting for.
Thanks for the comments,
Terry
@tgb
I think this is ultimately your best solution. Use the Link function within a note that will open the raw media folder on your hard drive for that person.
Gramps_5.1_Wiki_Manual_-_Entering_and_editing_data:detailed-_Link_Editor
The same can be done using the person’s Internet tab
Gramps_5.1_Wiki_Manual_-Entering_and_editing_data%3A_detailed-_Internet
Two key facts. Once the file location is set in one of these links, you cannot alter your raw media folder structure (without altering these links).
The second is that the note with the link or the Internet record can be set Private if you do not want/need these added to reports etc. After all, the link only makes sense to your computer.
So far, I’ve attached citations only to persons and events. Within those citations, in the gallery, I attach any relevant media objects (images from whatever sources I’m citing). I also attach a note with I link to the online image, if there is one. (Realizing that such links can become obsolete, I make sure my source citations have enough detail so that I could go back and find the images again if necessary.)
But I don’t have any citations attached to the media objects themselves. That seems like extra work, because in the Media view I just use the References to lead me to the citation that uses an image. Am I doing things backwards? I know the motto is “whatever works for you” but I’d like to know if there are drawbacks to my approach. At this point my database is still small, only a few hundred images, so now is the time to change.
In my earlier post about using filters in the Media category, I didn’t have any specific use cases in mind, but here’s an example. Suppose I wanted to see all of the birth certificates from a given geographical area (say, a state or province) for a given branch of the family. If I could create a custom filter in the media category that could reference event filters, place filters, and person filters, then I could do this. Maybe that’s not a particularly useful example, but I hope it illustrates my point. I guess I could also use tags, and assign one or more tags to each image, but I would prefer to leverage what Gramps already knows about an image by virtue of the citations in which I’ve included it in the gallery. So in the example above, Gramps may not know that an image is a birth certificate or a newspaper announcement, but if it is in the gallery of a citation for a birth event, then I would want it to appear in the results.
Overall, I’d like to keep a very simple file system structure for my images, and use views and filters in Gramps whenever I want to find particular images or sets of images, rather than navigating in my file system outside of Gramps.
Thanks for all the advice and examples, it’s very helpful.
A citation are a reference to a source/document, with details of that document (document can be “anything”), a source usually have a repository (one or more…) where you can find either the original or any copies of the document…
An Event are connected to the source by a citation, a detail of the source (a source can have multiple citations to different part of it…
The Event are connected to one or more people, and to a place… (untill Gramps get support for Events for Places :-))…
I think an image of a document (source) should be added to the gallery for the source, a Portrait should be added to the persons media gallery, and a photograph or a drawing/painting of an Event, should be added to the Event…
If you add a image to the source, you dont need to cite the source with a citation on the image… but you could make Notes with a link to people mentioned in a document, to “cross reference” them or “short cut” some links…
but since Gramps support using citations in a cross reference style, you can use that or the links in Notes, it depend on what you find to be best for you…
…
My usuall approach is to first add/find the Repository for the source im adding, adding the source and all its data, then add citations to the source (as many as I think I need, different info, different citation.), the citation is then added to an Event, and that Event are linked to a place and all the people that are participants of that Events, I do not use citations from a person to a source, everything goes through the Events…
If/when I want to add additionally links betweein entities, I use one or more Notes, and add direct links to where I want it… It would have been great if it was 100% automated and dynamic, but that is nearly impossible to get done without reducing the performance of Gramps…
…
I allways recommend people using a DAM software/tool to keep their digital documents and images organized and keyworded (exif metadata can be indexed and then its easier to search and get correct hits… that way they have a uniform way of controlling media, and its usually easy to keep track of the media and to add metadata…
In addition I use Zotero as a Citation/Bibliography tool, that way I can create uniform Citation Strings in a standard form that I can add to any text field I would…
this was a little side track… sorry about that…
Thank you, Jaran, that’s very helpful. My approach is similar, except I use person source citations instead of note links when other people are mentioned in a document (if they do not have a role in the event).
I understand the power of using other software for managing the details of the images, but I am still hoping I can leverage Gramps by suggesting more filtering capability in the Media category. I will think about it some more.
I really like the flexibility that Gramps provides. Thanks to all of the developers!
