Friday, October 14, 2011

Follow-Up Friday - Is there a limit on Media files in Family Tree Maker?

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Judy commented in my post Exploring Family Tree Maker 2012 - Post 4: Census Source Citation Comparison:

"Like you, I download the census (or other documents) files and attach them to a person. I currently use FTM 2011 but may upgrade to 2012. Can you comment on the “bogging down” of the program that attaching a lot of files causes. Is there any limit to the amount of media you can import? How does RootsMagic 4 compare to FTM in this regard? "

I don't think that there's any limit to the number of media items you can import - other than your computer hard drive capacity.  Since FTM 2011 and other modern programs only create a text link to your document files (on your computer), there is not a problem with file size caused by media items.  That wasn't the case with FTM 16 and earlier - the media items were included in the database file itself, which bloated the file size and slowed down loading the database. 

FTM 2011 and 2012 are slow at start up for me, and during program operation - I think it's because of the number of persons, notes, sources, etc. that are in the database.  I wait more than 30 seconds now for FTM 2012 to start up because I have over 40,000 persons in my database, and have only a few media items. 

RootsMagic 4 opens quickly (with the same number of persons, notes, sources, etc. in the database) - within five seconds. 

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