First Look at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - Post 9: Gathering Media Files

Rather than do a comprehensive look step-by-step at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - I did that for Version 7.0, and 8.0 is an improvement on Version 7.0 - I'm going to highlight new (or old) features I find as I work through the program screens.  New or updated features in Legacy Family Tree are listed in Legacy Family Tree 8.0 Now Available.

Today, it's the "Media Gatherer" feature.  The description of this feature is:

"Got pictures all over your computer? The new Media Gatherer will help you copy or move your genealogy pictures to one common folder, making it easier to share your family file with another computer or family member."

After I relinked all of my media items in yesterday's post (First Look at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - Post 8: Relinking Media Items), I wanted to put all of the media items into one file folder so they could be more easily transferred to my laptop or to a Dropbox file when I share my files with another researcher.  

1)  From any "View" screen, click on the "Tools" menu item and then select the "Gather Media" button:

2)  After clicking the "Gather Media" button, the "Relink Media" dialog box opened, but it told me that, since I had 2 unlinked files (from yesterday), it could not gather all of my media.  In order to make this work, I had to check the box that said "Unlink missing media files" in the "Relink my Media" tab.

Once I did that, then I could open and use the "Gather My Media Files" tab:

The Media Gatherer wants to put all of my media in a specific Media file folder in the Legacy Family Tree file folder.  That works for me.  I also checked the "Make a list of all copied media files" item on the screen above.

Then I clicked on the large "Gather My Media Files" button.

I was asked "Do you want a copy all the media files linked to your family file into the selected Media folder?":

I clicked "Yes" on the screen above.

3)  The media files were copied to the selected Media folder, and this question appeared:

That told me that 119 media items had been added to the selected Media file - I had already done this once before.  The program did not add the ones previously copied to the folder.

I clicked "Yes" on the screen above.

4)  Now I was asked "One or more Media files were copied to the Media folder. Would youl ike to view the Log file in your Text Editor?"

I clicked on "Yes" and saw the list of added Media items in the text editor:

5)  I went to the My Documents/Legacy Family Tree/Media file folder and saw the list of 606 media items in the file:

The file names are exactly what I named them.  That's good!  A look at the Properties for this file folder shows that it takes 544 mb of file space.

6)  This worked really well, and required no real technical knowledge or skills.  Well, except for knowing how to find the media files in my file folder structure.

Now I can copy the Media file folder to my laptop, or save it in a cloud service as a backup to my computer hard drive and external drive.

One problem for me is the process of adding more media to the database.  If I continue to add media items to my Surname files, then I will have to do this process every once in awhile, and especially before I share my database with somebody else or upload my database to an online family tree.

The URL of this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/12/first-look-at-legacy-family-tree_11.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver