Today, it's the "Media Relinking" feature. The description of this feature is:
" It is easier than ever to locate missing or unlinked pictures. Moving from one computer to another is simpler to do."
I have all of my Media items in a large number of file folders, one for each ancestral couple, plus some in Picture file folders. I found that I had 16 media items that were not linked. I may have changed the file name, or moved them from one file folder to another since I initially linked them. I wanted to relink them if I could find them.
Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 makes this task pretty easy, although it takes several minutes if a database has many media items and many gigabytes of files on their computer (I have 181 gb of files on my C drive).
Here is the process I used to relink almost all of my media files:
1) From any View screen, click on the "Tools" menu, and then the "Media Relinker" button:
2) The "Media Relinker" dialog box opened, and there are two tabs - one for "Relink My Media" and the other for "Gather My Media Files."
On the "Relink My Media" tab, there is a set of directions, and a note that "There are 16 broken media links in the family file." I couldn't get a list of them without trying to Relink the missing files.
There are three check boxes at the bottom of the "Relink Media" screen - for "Unlink missing media files," a second for "Make a list of all missing media files," and the third for "Also search for files in Windows system folders."
I checked the second box to obtain a list of my missing media files.
3) I clicked on the large "Relink My Media" button, and the system worked for several minutes (I could see the file folder name as they were searched). I got a message near the end of the search:
Apparently, I have at least one media items that have a file path/name string too long for the field for the file path/name. I clicked "No" and the search continued.
4) The system also found that I had a media item in more than one place, and gave me a choice to select it, link to all of the duplicate files, or to not link to any of them.
I chose to Connect one of the media items:
5) The "Media Relinker" finished and it told me that there were only two media files that are missing:
The system asked me if I wanted to see a list of the missing files.
6) I did, so I clicked the "Yes" button and the text list opened in Notepad:
There is only one file, with two media links to different events.
7) This was a very useful exercise - it got almost all of the missing media files into the Legacy database, but it told me which media files I need to go find in my computer file folders and add to the database.
It also sets up the next step - to gather all of the media items in one place so that they can be easily transferred from one program or online family tree to another. I'll discuss that in the next post in this series.
The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/12/first-look-at-legacy-family-tree_10.html
Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver
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