I am on Window 10 with version 5.1.3. I have imported a GEN file from Ancesty; I realise that the images aren’t put into GEN, so I have images stored in one location, but under separte folders for surnames.
Is there a way to point the image location to that folder, AND to also go into the folders. I have seen that a base path for images can be set, and have done that, but the images aren’t being seen.
Do I have to run a tool to pull the images in? Should I have the images all in 1 folder?
Apologies if this or something similar has been written; I couldn’t do a search as I’m new.
There is another post but that has a lot of trial & error steps to slog through. I’m not a user of the Media feature but I’ll try to boil it down until a more Media experienced user comes online. (Tonite, you’re the beneficiary of a bit of insomnia.)
(Fortunately, you’ve done the hard part to explain, putting/downloading the files into a folder and setting the Media base path.)
You can use the Media Verify tool (this is a free add-on) to find the images in the new base path location.
This tool will scour the subdirectories of the basepaths too. So the collection hierarchy of folders doesn’t have to be ‘flattened’.
In Gramps Preferences, you can set the Base path for relative media paths on the General tab. As an example mine is c:\users\Public\Genealogy\Media. All of my media files are in folders in this media folder. The Path field in the Media record then holds the sub-folder and file name i.e. Births\Washington, George 1732-02-22.jpg
The problem, when you imported the Ancestry file, what was the Path that was set in each media record?
The Media Verify tool already suggested only works if Gramps has already found the media and set its checksum. The Media Manager tool allows you to make string substitution in the path field. The goal is to make the edits so that the Base Path plus the record’s Path field matches each file on your hard drive.
Media Manager can only alter the Path field. You tell the tool what string in the path to search for and to replace it with another string. You can tell it to search and by leaving the replace field blank, it will erase the search string.
It can either remove the path set in Preferences from the record’s path, or add it.
I have never used the add media function. But from what I understand, if you have a Births\ directory already in the records, the tool will find other files in the Birth folder and add the media record to Gramps if it does not already exist. But any added media record will not be added to any person or event. So you will have more work to do.
You can do this for all the media on you hard drive and then Merge (individually) with the media records created from the Ancestry import. Again, a lot of work depending on the number of records.
The Media Verify works off the media record’s checksum. You add a media record to Gramps, Gramps will set the checksum as meta information. So if you subsequently rename or move the file (after reorganizing the files on the hard drive) the tool will find that file again and automatically make the changes to the records. If you edit the raw file, crop or resize it, the Verify tool will no longer see it. It will report it as missing while at the same time reporting that the altered file is not in the Gramps records.
In Verify, there is a Generate option which will set/reset all the checksums. So once you have all the paths set, the Generate is a function you will want to run. But until the checksums are set, Verify cannot change the path information. It will just report there are all these media files in the directory that are not in Gramps but will not be able to add them. The Verify’s Fix option only works on files with known checksums.
As I said. The problem is that the Path information from the Ancestry import does not resemble the path structure to your files on the hard drive.