Imported media (e.g. from MyHeritage GEDCOM export) handling

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Hello All!

I’m in the process of trying to move my genealogy research away from MyHeritage to a local database, for which Gramps is very well suited. So far it ticks almost 100% of all the boxes, even though media handling is still a bit weird to me. It could be a bug, but before I assume that to be the case I thought it prudent to ask here in case it’s due to my own lack of knowledge.

Here is a common scenario:

Importing a GEDCOM 5.5.1 file generated by MyHeritage results in quite a lot of warnings. This is mostly due to non-standard GEDCOM tags found in jpeg objects like the following extract (line numbers was added by my text editor for reference):

   1082 1 OBJE
   1083 2 FORM jpg
   1084 2 FILE https://sites-cf.mhcache.com/e/1/az1zaXRlc192MSZzPTRhZWRhOWU3ZTk1MmQwZmZhM2ExZTJlZWMwOWFiNDk3YmY3YTk1MzNkMmE4Y2Q5OWVhY2U5MTg4ZjM4Nzc5MmMmZT0xNzUxMzY0MDAw/165/258/8984/500009_461604lq9r7aa42668321c_A.jpg
   1085 2 _FILESIZE 11996
   1086 2 _PRIM Y
   1087 2 _CUTOUT Y
   1088 2 _PARENTRIN MH:P500001
   1089 2 _PERSONALPHOTO Y
   1090 2 _PHOTO_RIN MH:P500009

Lines 1082 to 1084 contains the “meat and potatoes”, while all the other 6 lines all result in an error due to the “_” in the keyword. This is all good, the record gets imported with noise and all. However, I would have thought that the graphic in the link on line 1084 would be imported as a media object, but that is not the case. The gallery tab for a record that has a locally added media file will display it inline, while an imported record that has objects in links like the above GEDCOM example displays them like this in the Gramps UI:

image
image967×615 45.6 KB

Each generic mini-thumbnail is a link like the above example, and within the Gramps UI you have to double-click it to open in an external viewer (in this case it will be whatever is set as my default web-browser). Is there perhaps a better way for me to either display links like this, or fully import the media?

Any comments/advice would be gratefully received! :smiley:

Regards,
Jan Henkins

2

Welcome!

The tags starting with an underscore are non-standard (aka “custom”) tags. Gramps pipes them into a Note so that the data is not lost but otherwise ignores them.

As for the Media object URLs, since they are not locally stored image files, the Gramps thumbnailer plugin does not generate the 2 (normal and large) thumbnails. As you pointed out, instead of an image handling helper application, the URL is linked to a browser as the helper application.

However, there is an addon that will fetch the remotely stored URL image files to local storage : DownloadMedia

Please make a backup and set the relative base path for media in your Preferences before using.

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Hi there!

Brilliant, I’m going to test this right away.

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4

Thank you very much, that worked a treat! I had a few errors (two out of 329 media files), but when you are dealing with bulk processes there is bound to be a few items that won’t play ball due to some arbitrary issue, easily dealt with manually thanks to the very clear error messages. I continue being bowled over by Gramps and this community, thank you again!

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