Recently on Ancestry, I was looking at my mother’s lines when I saw a hint that went to another tree. This intrigued me as on these lines I can only go back to my 2nd great-grandparents, which their information is very sketchy. Looking at his profile, he was from Germany. Inside, I was thinking ‘yes! Finally a relative is on Ancestry and maybe I can learn more.’ I contacted him and I found he wasn’t a relative and was actually working on a community genealogy project, which will be very beneficial to many people. Sometimes a small part of the good work backfires. As with my relatives.
Maybe you have had this happen to you where you have a photo of a loved one on your public tree and somebody copies it, and when you look, it is linked to the wrong person in their tree. I call this “media operator error” and, as a result, it got me thinking of a possible solution for my own tree.
This is what happened.
Wrong Images
As soon as I contacted “Fritz,” he started copying public photos that are on Ancestry for my family that happened to be on my cousin’s tree. You are probably wondering why he didn’t copy the images from my tree? I currently have my tree as private but searchable. I did this for personal reasons. For the longest time, my tree was public and if someone copied wrong sources or images from my tree, I didn’t contact them. I just worried about my own tree being true and knew I couldn’t police all of them on Ancestry. Policing will detract from my research and that is not my job. This is the number one reason I do not copy anybody’s tree. Sure, I look at trees and their sources, but I do all my own research. Sadly, a lot of people don’t.
This is one major way that trees get screwed up and it eventually trickles down to the AncestryDNA Thrulines. With Fritz, aunts and nieces have the same names and the wrong image were linked.
In several posts, I have discussed media options on Ancestry, but this one, Ancestry Companies don’t Make it Easy to Transfer Trees has a section about copying media from another tree to a person in your tree. How could he get it wrong with these options available to him? All he needed to remember was when they were born.
One thing I thought would help him was to invite him to be a guest on my tree so he can directly copy from my tree to his. Sadly, he still copied to the wrong person, and it was the same problem as before: niece and Aunt having the same names.
This Got Me Thinking
So, if I could hide all my media, not just photos of people, but my hard researched wills and parish records to name a few, I could then have my tree public again. Then I could let my DNA cousins view my tree so they might see how we are cousins.
Currently, the only options on Ancestry are public, fully private, or private but searchable. This got me thinking, since I knew I could take off media and make it private with Family Tree Maker, could I do this with my entire tree and make it public once again? How Family Tree Maker works is you can mark individual media as private and, when synced, it pulls off the media on Ancestry but leaves it safely intact on your Family Tree Maker. If you want to make it public again, all you need to do is reverse the option, sync again, and the media is back on Ancestry.
If I can do it with individual media, maybe I could make this an automatic option using FTM, thereby making my Ancestry tree public once again. If this could work, it could be a solution for so many family genealogists on Ancestry that want to have their tree public, but not have the media visible for personal reasons. Could this be done automatically with Family Tree Maker?
Checking Out FTM Media
Since making a single image on Family Tree Maker was easy, I thought they would also have the automatic media privacy in place as well. Before doing any changes with your tree, I recommend doing a full backup as that will back up any media. The auto backup is more like a gedcom where it only backs up the basic tree, but not media.
It is a good thing I have not done any changes or syncing since I transferred my software and tree to my new computer, as trying to figure out marking all my media as private had a bit of an issue.
I logged in and went to the main workspace with all the tabs. I thought the most likely place to find the options I needed would be in the media tab.
After looking around, I didn’t see any options for automatically privatizing all my media. With the first image selected, I could see off to the right that I could mark that image as private.
Mind you, while working on individual ancestor’s pages, I have marked at the time of working on them to be private. So that is not new and if I used this approach on all 23,761 images to private, it would take me a good chunk of time.
So there must be a way. The next thing I did was look in the help tab. I clicked on media and didn’t see anything on the list for that chapter about making media private.
A quick use of the search bar later, I typed in “Private Media”, but it was what I knew already: to select the photo and either right click ‘mark private’ or select the icon button with the lock to mark it as private. No other information on how I can automatically have all media as private.
Next, I contacted Family Tree Maker.
FTM Live Chat
I didn’t have to wait long to chat, as they have a chart posted before you start of the best times and “off-peak” hours to contact them. Basically, my question was ‘how do I set up the automatic media private on my entire tree?’ To my disappointment, that is not an option on FTM. They said I could select all the media at once and mark it private, but after the mass marking to private, I would still need to mark the media as I added them.
They gave me the instructions, and they stayed on with me while I tried. I have to say the way I needed to implement it seemed a little old school. There was no button in the media tab to click “Select all”. Instead, I had to use some basic computer short codes, which I use some normally for internet shortcuts, but not solely as the only option in a software program. To me, FTM could use a refresh as it does seem a little clunky and slow. If only they could be as easy and less cluttered-looking as Ancestry since they are syncing partners.
Ctrl+A and Reverse
The instructions were:
- Go to the “Media” workspace (which you can see in the photo at the beginning).
- Click any media file , press Ctrl +A.
- All your media files should become highlighted.
- Right-click any of your media files and choose ‘Mark Private’ in the drop-down menu.
When I clicked Ctrl +A, it didn’t seem to do anything. I finally got it all highlighted and did the right click and selected ‘Mark Private’ and again didn’t see anything happening. It finally caught up and I saw an hour glass meaning it was working on it. The support person commented “If you have many media files it takes time to process.” I then commented I had over 23,000 media files. I said this could take some time and told her we can end the chat and, if I have any other problems, I can start another chat as they keep this chat in my file, so we can pickup right where we left off.
I am not sure how long it took as I left to work on something in the kitchen, but I came back about 15-20 minutes later and it was finished. They were all marked private. That is as far as I went and did not sync. About two weeks passed as I didn’t want to implement right away. During this time I thought about it and decided not to sync. Even though I marked all the media in my entire tree private, it still wasn’t ideal with what I truly wanted, which was automatic privatizing the media. I didn’t want to have to redo this over and over again, even if it was for only 10 photos or doing it at the time I uploaded. I wanted it to be where I never had to waste time on this again.
To reverse it you just do the Ctrl+A and deselect media. Something went awry as it started deleting files. I quickly stopped the deleting process. I was surprised that it started deleting without asking me do I really want to delete or maybe it did and I didn’t realize it was about deleteing and thought it was for the unmarking the privitazation. FTM reported that 23 were deleted, or were not linked to the person.
Again I tried to reverse the privatization of the media and this time I was successful. Now just need to relink the media that was unlinked.
Relinking Deleted Media
When I was chatting with the tech support, they tried to help me recover the images with using the missing media report. There are a few other ways to restore my tree, but they seemed to be a little complicated at the time. (Now I probably would have used turned back time if it was listed in my Changelog. When I was instructed to try this there wasn’t anything in my changlog.)
Maybe if I opened and closed FTM, I would have seen it. It sometimes seems to be a little slow and I did ask support if there was anyway to “refresh/reload” the page like on an internet webpage. Of course, since my images were deleted, I couldn’t just relink them, but would need to find them where I stored them other than Family Tree Maker.
I was in luck as since my main tree is on Ancestry and FTM houses my copy, all I needed to do was delete from Family Tree Maker, readd the image on Ancestry and rename it. If that hadn’t worked, I could have found the images on either my computer or my thumb drive where I store all images before I upload to my tree on Ancestry. Either way, it would signal to FTM there is something new to add to FTM.
Regardless, it worked, and the images were now back on FTM. Yay!
At The End of The Day
Now that I have my tree back to where I had it when I first started, what I have learned from this is:
You can
- Make all your media private.
- Make your tree public so people can collaborate and DNA cousins can view.
But:
- It is not automatically done on FTM.
- Requires time to continually marking media private.
I decided not to implement this with Family Tree Maker.Making our media private would be an excellent option for Ancestry to implement as they already have choices like Public, Completely Private, Private but searchable, why not Public with the media Private? Or at least have the option button on each of the images to mark as private/public like on FTM.
Maybe if they offered more private media options, Ancestry would see more trees going public. I would be the first to do so, because I would now have full control over who sees what. (In the beginning my tree was public, but when our parents died, I had it all on Ancestry to see. By the time I found out how to make media and personal information private on FTM, it was too late as all their images were copied to their tree. Once copied it is permanently on their tree.)
At the end of the day, we should have full control of how we want our tree to be represented on Ancestry. At the least, we might see a decrease in media operator errors. A win-win for all!
