Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Post 11: Working with Photos

Previous posts in this series to evaluate Family Tree Builder are found in Family Tree Builder 4.0 - Summary of Posts.

In this post, we will show some of the ways to work with the photographs added in Post 10. I clicked on the "Photos" menu icon and the list of my uploaded photos appeared. There are five buttons at the top of this photo list - New, Edit, View, Slideshow and Delete:



I highlighted a photo in the list above, and clicked on the "Edit" button, and then on the "Associations" tab on the "Edit Photo" menu:




The screen above shows the list of persons associated with the photograph. If I select one of these persons on the list, I can "Mark Face" of one or more of these persons - to use as a thumbnail photo or in a facial recognition program. I'll do that later!

The "Options" tab has two check boxes - one for "This image is a scanned document" and the other is "Turn off automatic face detection in this photo":



I chose the latter. I wanted to check both of them, but when I check the "scanned photo" box it would not let me check the "Turn off..." box for some reason. This makes no sense to me!

Back to the main "Photos" screen, I clicked on the "View" button and saw the photo in the "MyHeritage Image Viewer:"





The photograph is in the center panel, and the Associated persons are on the right. The user can choose from the "First," "Back," "Next," "Last," "Zoom In," "Zoom out," "Actual Size," "Print," "Set as Wallpaper," "Photo Information," and "About" icons on the viewer menu row.

I "Xed" out of the Image Viewer, and clicked on the "Slideshow" button on the main "Photos" page:



A slideshow started up, showing each picture for about six seconds each. I saw no way to change the time setting, or to do anything else but to go back to the start, go back one photo, go forward one photo, go to the end of the filmstrip, or stop the slideshow. To exit the slideshow, I had to choose the "Photos" icon on the icon menu row:




When I did that, I saw the list of photos and for some reason there were only ten of them, and not the first two, including the one I worked on in the list above. Then I noticed that the top portion of the photos page has check boxes for "Photos," "Documents," and "Audio/Videos."

I unclicked the "Photos" box and clicked on the "Documents" box and saw the two "missing" photos:




I don't know if I caused this unintentionally, or if the program decided that when I clicked on "This image is a scanned document" that it put the image in the "Document" classification rather than the "Photo" classification. I just did a test, and that is what happened. The photos that I clicked on the "This image is a scanned document" box in the "Options" menu were put into the "Documents" classification. I went back and unclicked the "scanned document" box!

Over on the right-hand side of the "Photos" screen are check boxes for "Table" and "Thumbnails" with a slide bar for the size of the thumbnails. I did everything above using the "Table" box checked. When I clicked on the "Thumbnails" box, and slid the slidebar up a bit, I saw the thumbnails for all of the photos in my collection:


All of these options for the photographs are useful and helpful, and the menus and navigation are almost intuitive. Sometimes, the user has to go exploring to figure out how to do things.

In the next post, we'll look at some of the Reports that Family Tree Builder 4.0 can create.

No comments: