Gramps Functional Expansion Ideas

Ideas
1

Hello All,

I am new to the Gramps Dev community and after having looked at the setup requirements that would allow me to pursue what I envision, I am very intimidated.

Background:

I have “inherited” the custody of my family’s tree that one of my uncles and my father previously converted from a 1940s paper tree to Excel. This had not been updated in at least 20 years. I will spare you the voyage, but I was able to write some code, do a lot of fact checking & corrections and migrate the Excel to Gedcom and load it into Grampshub.

I have since been maintaining the tree in Grampshub and have written code to convert the Gedcom back to both Excel and Sheets spreadsheets and incorporated links in the spreadsheets back to the Grampshub entries. We now have over 1,500 Persons.

My Vision:

When taking on this project, I envisioned a unified portal that would allow me to use the family tree as the core element to combine family Photos/Videos & Anecdotes.

The idea is to provide a moderated portal where people may send in updates and share information about the family.

For the photos/videos: I am looking to harness the power and storage available in Google Photos since many (20+) years ago I scanned thousands of historic family photos and cataloged these including facial recognition using Google’ s Picasa (discontinued). These were also uploaded to Google Photos. This does not include the incomprehensible number of personal photos the individual family members have taken and shared since then.

Anecdotes:

I was envisioning a WIKI type structure similar to what is used in Wikipedia’s biographical articles. One suggestion was to create the anecdote “pages” using Google Docs files. I currently have a ton of unedited word files, emails, etc. of source material.

I can see Gramps as being the core of such a portal, as many of these functions, although not well implemented, are already part of the application.

Any Thought, Ideas, Help, or Feedback is welcome.

Thank you.

2

Hello and welcome to Gramps.

Google Photos is great, but keep in mind that if your Google account gets blocked because the AI ​​deems some pictures too revealing (like a baby splashing around in a pool without swim trunks), everything is gone.

I save everything locally and upload it as needed, wherever that might be.

Check out this post:

3

Thank you for your replies.

Yes, I have local backup copies with a working copy of Picasa.

Considering that we must depend on someone’s cloud, I still think that for the end user, this simplifies the experience. It’s either that or put up walls that make it more difficult for people to access and share their information.

And I know that it will mean that we may have to migrate again…

4

Picasa may be long discontinued but it still works in Windows 11. I use it daily.

5

But I think that important point was that Google Photos evilly strips the Picasa metadata as it passes through.

(I’ve been working on having the Photo Tagging gramplet leverage the DigiKam metadata more effectively. But haven’t tested the Picasa or Google Photos metadata dialects.)

6

Hi @Netuser-Py,

interesting ideas! Just to understand better – since you mention Grampshub, are you mostly thinking about Gramps Web or Gramps in general?

Concerning anecdotes: for me personally, sharing anecdotes was the original motivation for adding the blog feature to Gramps Web. Are you using that actively?

Concerning photos/videos: I don’t see why Gramps media objects wouldn’t work for this purpose – that’s what I’m doing personally – but I’m interested in what you’re missing.

What’s entirely missing from Gramps Web today is a biography feature. It’s also something I like about Wikitree, see e.g. here (even if I don’t use Wikitree myself).

In my opinion, Gramps Notes would be a perfectly viable option for a biography page. We’d just need to agree on a universal convention for marking a note as a biography. Then Gramps Web could display it in an appropriate way. Perhaps just a new dedicated NoteType in Gramps core?

7

There’s a Biography quick report addon (originally intended for contributing as a WikiTree biography) that might be a starting point. At one time, I had adapted mine to mention the Parents of the spouse too. Seem to have misplaced that hack.

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8

Yes. This is a use case where we would consider adding a new NoteType.

9

Yes. I installed a local copy of Picasa.

10

Thank you for your reply @DavidMStraub,

Q1) Are you mostly thinking about Gramps Web or Gramps in general?

A1) I’m not sure, but if enough people agree with this vision, I could see the functionality being introduced across the board.

I am currently using your “vanilla wrapped” Gramps Hub. One of my concerns with this model is legacy. I do not have a designated successor. I will not be around forever; I am hoping to find someone in my family to take over, and that the community will continue to support Gramps Hub.

I am considering setting up a dev instance locally, but I do not see going to prod on my own.

Q2) Concerning anecdotes: for me personally, sharing anecdotes was the original motivation for adding the blog feature to Gramps Web. Are you using that actively?

A2) I am still at the stage of trying to get my close and distant family interested in the project. I need to link an offline contacts list to the database, but I worry about privacy.

I have not used the Blog function as I am concerned with effective curating these. I am currently getting stories in many different forms (email, WhatsApp, Word, voice…) sent to me. Additionally, most of the time, the people who are sending me the stories are not tech savvy enough to navigate to the right person in Gramps. That is why I’m looking at a curated option.

Q3) Concerning photos/videos: I don’t see why Gramps media objects wouldn’t work for this purpose – that’s what I’m doing personally – but I’m interested in what you’re missing.

A3) Gramps media object is fine for one or a few images per individual or Family, but the storage begins to get out of hand when dealing with thousands of Photos, and Home movies. My dad and his family we prolific. I also expect to use the same platform to share modern photos/videos (once again in the thousands). I can easily see storing 20+Gb. in media.

Gramps media also lack the facial recognition functions needed to help catalog the Images. The search functionality available in something like Google photos or Picasa would be extremely useful.

As I see it, Gramps photo, could link directly to individual images or to a find “Object” in Photos. The linkage could be established via “Individual” or “Family” or “Event” or “Places” cross reference table. Preview thumbnails of a cover image or images, could be displayed in Gramps.

Q4) biography feature?

A1) Gramps Notes could be an alternative, but it would need a full function editor and the ability to accept formatted Cut + Paste from a word processor or website.

Integrating the Wikitree could be available option. I was considering Google docs or forms for its functionality. Storage in Gramps is again a concern.

I am happy to have stirred the pot. :wink:

I look forward to your reply.

11

Please consider an automagicly produced Biography from the database as the base capability. (Similar to the Biography Quick Report.) So that you can create a more advanced manual Note of “Biography” type and have it supersede that basic dynamic content. But a feature that requires updating a Biography (in a text editor every time a vital statistic record is tweaked) sounds like a manual synchronization nightmare.