Attaching photos and documents in Family by Zaweba

A name and a date tell you that someone lived. A photograph tells you who they were. Family by Zaweba lets you attach pictures and scanned papers directly to the parts of your research they belong to, so a wedding photo sits with the marriage, a census page sits with the census entry, and a portrait greets you when you open a person's profile.

This article walks through where media can go, how to choose between keeping it inside the tree file or linked from your disk, and a few habits that keep a growing collection manageable.

Where a picture or document can live

Media can be attached at four levels: to a person, to an event, to a source and to a citation. Each level suits a different kind of item, and choosing well saves confusion later.

A person is the natural home for general pictures of them: a studio portrait, a holiday snap, a photo from old age. An event suits pictures tied to one moment, such as the wedding group outside the church or the gravestone for a burial. A source is where a whole document belongs, for example a scanned family Bible or a full parish register page. A citation is the most precise of all: the exact page or entry that backs up one fact, such as the line of a census return that lists your great grandmother as a servant.

If you are unsure, attach the item to the thing it proves. A birth certificate proves a birth, so it belongs with the birth event or with its citation, not floating on the person.

Setting a portrait

From the person profile you can set a portrait, the picture used to represent that person. It shows at the top of their profile, and portraits also appear in the family book PDF that Family makes from your tree. Pick a clear head and shoulders shot where you have one, because it will be shown small.

Stored inside the tree or linked from disk

In Tree settings you choose how media is kept. Stored means the pictures are copied into the .oft tree file itself. Linked means the tree remembers where each picture is on your disk and shows it from there. You can convert between the two at any time, in either direction.

Storing is the tidy choice. The whole of your research, people, sources and pictures together, is one file. Copy it to a memory stick or another computer and nothing goes missing. The cost is size: a tree with hundreds of high resolution scans becomes a large file.

Linking keeps the tree small and leaves your pictures where they already are, which suits anyone who keeps a carefully organised photo archive and doesn't want a second copy. The cost is that moving or renaming those folders breaks the link, and copying the tree alone to another machine leaves the pictures behind.

A sensible pattern is to link while you are actively gathering and sorting pictures, then convert to stored when you want a single file to back up or hand on. Because the conversion works both ways, nothing here is a permanent decision.

Getting pictures in without a hunt

If you have used Disk Sort by Zaweba on your photo folders, Family can read that library. From the profile, Add a photo has a From the Disk Sort library choice, and Tools has Pick photos from Disk Sort by Zaweba library. It lists your sorted folders, plus your Pictures folder, with the stars, keeper marks and keywords you gave them in Disk Sort, keepers first. Family only reads that data and never changes it.

That saves a lot of scrolling through thumbnails of near identical holiday shots when all you want is the one good picture of your grandfather.

Habits that pay off later

Name your scans before you attach them. A file called 1911 census Hartley household tells you far more in a folder than a camera number does, and it keeps meaning something if you ever export.

Attach the evidence to the citation as well as the transcript. A typed transcript is quick to search, but the image is what lets you, or a relative years from now, check the reading of a faded word.

Don't attach the same large scan to five people when one source would do. Put the document on the source, cite that source from each event it supports, and every person who appears in it is connected to it without duplicating the file.

When you share research with GEDCOM, the export can save stored photos to a folder beside the file, so the pictures travel with the text even though GEDCOM itself is plain text.

Pictures are what bring a tree to life for the rest of the family. A little care over where each one goes means they stay easy to find, and they end up in the right place in the charts and books you print.