Why and How Do You Use Other Software?

[Bob White]

One doesn't physically link them. Just sign both into the same iCloud account. Anything that you store in iCloud is visible on both devices plus your iPad and iPhone if you have those.

Go to https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/welcome/icloud for a good explanation of how iCloud works.

[Catherine Alder]

“After struggling to find a means of "linking" my two Macs together, using iCloud is the first solution that has worked.”

Please explain how you link your two Macs using ICloud. Thanks

[Kevin Forrester]

Ancestry retreats, by Judy G. Russell, “Ancestry retreats,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 6 Aug 2021.

[Kevin Forrester]

I pay Ancestry dot com an annual fee for access to information they have collected in order for me to build my family tree. That is the transaction. Ancestry dot com pays me nothing for anything that I may have found outside of Ancestry dot com and uploaded to and through their website in order to build my family tree. The deal was, I pay them money for information. Now they have changed the deal. Now they want money for their information and want to pay nothing for my information. That deal won’t fly. The first thing I deleted was emigration records of my European relatives that were known and available only to family members. Ancestry dot com did not provide me with these important records and they did not offer to purchase them from me. They simply said, my records are now their records, forever. I don’t think so. The next thing I delete will be pictures of all of my living relatives. Ancestry dot com did not bargain for my family pictures or my family documents, and they are not going to get them from me.

[Bob White]

Bob, does this recent Ancestry change impact your use of Ancestry as a bridge to get your uploaded media into FTM (an idea which I have adopted)?..........

It states: "As of the change, effective yesterday (3 August 2021), a user can’t change his or her mind about any content uploaded to Ancestry: as of yesterday, you’ve just gifted the rights to that content to Ancestry, forever."

I don't upload media in order to get it into my FTM. Why would I? Yes, I have said that I let FTM be my filing cabinet. I did not throw away my "sensible filing system." I still add items to that filing system and only rarely also upload an item to Ancestry.

I read this as being photos and documents uploaded by me. The great majority of my uploads to Ancestry is headshots of people. Most of the photos were not taken by me. Shoot! A large number of the photos are older than me and I was born during WWII.... So I don't "own" the photos anyway. At any rate, I see this as Ancestry claiming ownership to a copy while I still have my copy or original. Doesn't sound like anything that I'm going to lose any sleep about.

[Kevin Forrester]

Reunion is my main guy. However, I always keep the current version of FTM installed. The reason is twofold.

First, the majority of my research either is on Ancestry or I end up uploading items from all kinds of places to my tree on Ancestry.

This leads to my second reason ---- which is the synching of media between Ancestry and FTM. Do a synch and, voila, I have copies of all the media on my Mac. The only media that I include in Reunion's multimedia is photos of people. Everything else is easily found in my copy of FTM without my having to maintain a sensible filing system as I used to do for many years.

Bob, does this recent Ancestry change impact your use of Ancestry as a bridge to get your uploaded media into FTM (an idea which I have adopted)?
https://www.legalgenealogist.com/202...bCWdzTUHUjE7YM

I have unlinked my Ancestry.com tree from FTM and have started deleting things from Ancestry.com that I'm not willing to gift in perpetuity to Ancestry.com.

[Kevin Forrester]

You are correct. I was starting out looking for "media" about "people" by clicking the "people" button at the top of my screen, then searching for a person under the tree tab, and then finding that person's media as I described. However, if I start out looking for "media" by clicking the "media" button at the top of my screen, I find, as you say, a "person" (or whatever) on the left, seeing the media in the middle, and the data on the right. Voila! Thank you!

And thank you for your excellent suggestion of using Family Tree Maker basically as a ready-made media filing system (when linked to Ancestry). I've been ignoring FTM as my main genealogy program because I was not satisfied with the way I was able to represent same-sex couples with children under FTM, but the idea of using it as a data repository is brilliant. I am now looking at if for that role only. And I've given up waiting for the RootsMagic 8 native Mac program, have received help from Reunion support on how to represent same-sex couples with biological children, and have decided to go "all-in" in Reunion 13 as my main genealogy program (why wait for a brand-new native Mac program when you already own a genealogy program that has been Mac all of its life?) The sticking point in my selecting a program was always the same-sex couple issue, and Reunion resolves that issue.

[Bob White]

You may be overthinking this... The left side allows one to choose which kinds of media to see. The right side displays specific data for whichever item that has be selected in the collection. All media is in the large middle portion. Thus, I'm thinking that you might not have the real left panel displayed. It's a column with two tabs at the top for Collection and Detail.

[Kevin Forrester]

Why spend lots of time naming and moving files around when one has a tool to do it for them? Maintaining one's own filing system is much work for storage of documents that one wants handy but rarely looks at. By using FTM as my files, if I need to see a particular document for a person, I just fire up FTM, locate the person, click the media icon and there is all of that person's documents. If Reunion was synch-able with Ancestry, I would not have FTM.

Thank you for this. However, when I sync FTM and Ancestry, the documents do not sync (although I've checked the "Download Ancestry Citation Media" box). I'm certain that there is a step that I'm failing to complete. Can you let me know what that step might be? Thank you!

EDIT: I see that I jumped the gun on this question. The media does sync. When, as you say, you locate the person, under the Tree tab, and then click on the media icon, you find the media in the right panel. What was, and still is, confusing me is that when you locate the person under the Tree tab and then click the Person tab, you will see a Media tab in both the left and right panels. The photographs appear in the left panel and the source media appears in the right panel. If the person has no photographs, it looks as if the "media" panel (on the left) has no media, while the "source" media panel on the right has source media (Census doc's and the like). (This appears to be true of the left panel whether you click on "Photos" or "All Media".) I'm curious as to the reason for this result.

[Bob White]

Tom: This is a case of where you are driving a base level VW and I'm driving a decked out high end Audi. The difference is that I have lot more "after the shot" tools; the built-in tools in the OS are basic. But, with regard to pasting, we are in precisely the same situation. As I said above, I would love to either paste a clipping or drag to the posting I'm working on at the time.

[Tom Robinson]

Nearly of of my screenshots are done with Snagit. It automatically puts a copy in the OS clipboard unless one has turned off the feature.

I use the built-in capability: the whole screen, a portion, or the current window can be sent to the clipboard or a file.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361

[Bob White]

Nearly of of my screenshots are done with Snagit. It automatically puts a copy in the OS clipboard unless one has turned off the feature. This is useful for other things I do. But the clippings can't go direct in vBulletin. Either being able to paste a clipping or to drag a graphic to a sweet spot would be less steps than the current way. Hopefully, this conversation will generate an item for the future features list.

[theKiwi]

I wrote a post the other day here on ReunionTalk concerning the forum platform ("Discourse" my title). That standalone space is probably best for this topic, but to answer briefly: the "upload to server?" question (from vBulletin) presents when the user clicks the image icon, which in the editor is two "buttons" left of the quote button in the header. I should note to you, that the "upload attachments" option is preferred by me, which is below the editor of course. However, when I used it last, as I recall anyway (and I might be wrong on this?), my uploaded screenshot did not show up in the body of my post, as anticipated, but rather as a URL that others would have had to click on.

I must confess one of the things that frustrates my about this vBulletin system compared to Invision Power Boards, and I think phpBB is that in those forums I can simply paste a screen shot into the posting where I want it to be - so command-control-shift-4 to do a partial screen capture, and then paste it right into my post. Having to take the screen shot, and save it as a file, then navigate to that file in the "Upload Attachments" button adds several layers to the effort - particularly when you are now conditioned to always save screen shots to the clipboard for pasting.

Roger

[jmo]

For a very interesting program that helps analyze conflicting information and come up with logical proofs that can help resolve the conflicts, check out Evidentia <evidentiasoftware.com>. It is a Windows program but has a shell to allow running on macOS. It’s a bit funky, and you really will need to know the difference between a Source and a Citation, but I have found it to be useful. I take the final reports it generates and place into Reunion to validate the data I have entered.

[jmo]

For those using or thinking of using DEVONthink 3, be sure to get the book from <takecontrolbooks.com> that really helps explain how to use it. They also have a great book on using Scrivner, which I use for research and writing biographies.