Family Tree Maker 2017 Turn on Hints From Ancestry.com
Family Tree Maker* (FTM) 2019 was released on 29 Sep 2019, equally a 30th anniversary edition. I've been using FTM for over xx of those years, ever since Brøderbund Software released version 4.0 on CD-ROM for the first time. The software has seen many changes and improvements since its inception. The pre-order sale electronic mail from the current programmer, Software MacKiev, touted ten main reasons to upgrade to version 2019. I'll embrace each of those reasons in turn, too every bit a few other points, based primarily on using the version for macOS (Mojave), but I took a gander at the Windows version, as well.
i. Price
The total toll is $79.95, the regular upgrade cost is $59.95, and the current special upgrade toll is $49.95. I'll have more to say virtually the toll in my conclusion.
2. TreeVault Cloud Services
As the proper noun implies, this is a new cloud service offered by Software MacKiev to FTM users with the following features:
- Emergency Tree™ restore service. TreeVault keeps a continuously updated re-create of your tree ready to mitt back to yous if your difficult drive should crash or some other catastrophe strikes.
- FTM Connect™ is a Free mobile app (for iPad, iPhone and coming soon for Android) that displays your latest FTM tree anywhere, any time – even when your computer is off. Handy for sharing your tree with relatives or for using your iPad as a second monitor with your continuously updated tree.
- Historical Conditions™ puts color in your family unit story with more than a billion historical weather records. Dates will never exist boring over again.
- Adjacent of Kin™ allows yous to designate a successor to your TreeVault account to pass forth your family unit tree. You will get a certificate that may be included with a will, providing instructions and passcodes for taking over your business relationship along with your Family Tree Maker license.
FTM Connect has been renamed Family Tree Maker Connect and is available for gratis in the Apple App Store. I was not able to test Family unit Tree Maker Connect, since I don't ain an iPad or iPhone and the Android version isn't available yet. However, if it works well, information technology seems like this might be a useful characteristic of TreeVault, enabling you to view your tree on a mobile device. Withal, the mobile version will not have any media, since they're not uploaded to TreeVault. In this respect, the Beginnings.com mobile app is superior, since it displays whatsoever media that were uploaded with the tree or are attached to Ancestry sources. Software MacKiev suggests using a cloud file storage service, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple iCloud to dorsum up your FTM media folder. Depending on how much space the media folder requires, yous might take to pay additional for this storage.
Historical Weather is a separate function accessed from the TreeVault push button in the main toolbar or the Programme workspace. It works past entering a identify and date and bringing up one or more stations with the temperature and precipitation. The pre-order email implied information technology would be integrated with the events for a person, perhaps on the Timeline view where historical events can be shown, but this is not the instance. I suspect that Historical Weather will be more interesting to some people than others, and I doubt if it'due south worth touting as a major new characteristic.
Adjacent of Kin is a simple tool to designate a principal and alternate person by start and concluding proper name to receive your FTM license and access to your TreeVault in the issue of your death or incapacitation. The upshot is a certificate that tin can be printed or saved as a PDF file and kept with a will or otherwise given to a successor. It's a nice petty tool but not worth bragging about. Once over again, its main limitation is that a TreeVault tree contains only the basic tree without whatever media. A meliorate pick would exist to provide successors straight access to FTM files, including their fastened media.
three. Rich Color Coding is an enhancement to the color coding feature that was added to FTM 2017. Color coding allowed for adding colors to the ancestors of a person or a filtered list. For example, yous can mark each of your grandparents and their ancestors a unlike color (i.e., four different colors). Rich Color Coding adds the power to mark all of a person'due south descendants with divide colors, as well. Manifestly this feature is well-nigh useful when viewing your tree in graphical view, although the colour coding can be displayed in the Tree Index, too. The feature works every bit advertised. It'due south a small, incremental improvement, not a major new feature.
4. Tree Browser is another pocket-sized new feature; as the proper name suggests, it enables viewing all of your FTM trees, organized by "Recent," "All Trees," "FTM Folder," "Ancestry," and "TreeVault." For each tree there are details about its size, number of people and media, dates created and modified, and Ancestry and TreeVault link condition. Copse tin be created, opened, or deleted from this window. Some of the functionality is duplicated in the Programme workspace, where some of the functionality is simply available for the currently open tree (i.e., number of people in the tree, etc.).
5. Contour Picture Cropping Tool "detects the person's face and zooms merely the right amount, then crops a perfect foursquare so that information technology fits perfectly on each leaf of your tree. And best of all, the original photo is not touched." This tool is supposed to use "smart technology" to detect a person's face, but it's currently smart enough only if at that place is 1 face in the photo, even though the case in the pre-lodge sale electronic mail showed a photo with four faces.
Although the autocropping characteristic is a bit express, it is prissy to be able to zoom in on a profile photo correct from the People workspace and to take information technology be non-destructive, as well (the original photo is not inverse). It should be noted that zoom and ingather adjustments made in FTM are non synced with an Ancestry.com tree.
6. Folder Counters are simply the number of items on the Person Notes, Media, Web Links, and Tasks tabs and Fact Sources, Media, and Notes. Personally I don't find this characteristic terribly important, since I can come across at a glance whether in that location are any notes, sources, or source media or not. The chief matter I might apply information technology for is for tabs whose contents are subconscious, like the Person Media or Tasks tabs; seeing that I don't accept any media fastened might prompt me to find some, or that in that location'south one task might make me see what information technology is.
7. Smart Filters is an enhancement of the Filtered List feature added in FTM 2017, which immune for saving of lists of people that were filtered according to sure criteria, such as military service. Previously the lists were static, meaning they did not automatically update if you added new people that matched the criteria to the tree. Smart Filters borrows from the smart binder idea commonly used in macOS or saved searches in Windows 7, 8, and x. If I save a filtered listing of people who served in World War II, information technology will now automatically update whenever I add more people who as well served. This is a small merely welcome comeback. Note that Smart Filters do non work with filters imported from FTM 2017 because the criteria that were used to create them were not saved; but the people in the lists were. And then filtered lists from FTM 2017 will take to be recreated if y'all want them to exist Smart Filters.
One unheralded part of Smart Filters is the power to reuse weather condition from an existing smart filter and combine them with new conditions. You tin also merge weather from ii or more smart filters. This is supposed to give you the ability to broaden or narrow a filter. While it may save a little time recreating and modifying a filter, in practice it doesn't work the way you might call back. I thought I could take my World War 2 filter, add together my filter of people built-in in Iowa, and become only the people that matched both criteria (i.eastward., narrow the search). Unfortunately, all information technology does is augment the search by calculation the two criteria together, giving me both people who served in World State of war Ii AND were built-in in Iowa. To narrow the results downward to those born in Iowa, I had to filter out those who were NOT born in Iowa. This list still included people with no nativity place, and the only way to filter them out is to add a birth effect for all of them and get out the birth place bare.
eight. Hints in the Index shows whether in that location are Beginnings or FamilySearch hints for each person in the Index, not just on a person'due south profile. Of class, this merely works if y'all are logged in to each website and, in the case of Ancestry, your tree is linked. This tin can be useful if you want to check for hints for people in a filtered list, similar the World War II example above. Annotation that not all hints load in the index at in one case, due to the demand it places on servers. Hints load only for people visible in the Alphabetize, but in one case they're loaded, they stay in that location until yous clear them.
nine. FamilySearch Integration 2.0 improves upon the FamilySearch (FS) integration that was added to FTM 2017, which only provided hints to FS Family Tree and allowed you to lucifer profiles to your tree. FTM 2019 adds the ability to match FS historical records to people in your tree, with the caveat that you will see simply records that are non already attached to the FS Family Tree profile. Once a historical record is attached to a FS Family unit Tree profile, you can just run into it past looking at the contour. In whatsoever case, attaching historical records is dissimilar from attaching records from Ancestry because you tin can't attach them directly. You must either use the spider web clipping tool, which can be laborious, or lucifer the unabridged profile to a person in your tree.
I like how profiles with FamilySearch historical records have a different icon, and merging FamilySearch historical records could be a skillful feature if it worked the aforementioned as merging Beginnings records, and it is definitely useful to encounter historical records that are on Family Search but not matched to the person. In fact, it would as well be useful to come across and merge records that are already matched to the FamilySearch profile, because I never want to merge the whole profile to my tree, as I'll explain in a moment. Equally it works now, I'thou afraid many users will either be confused or dissatisfied, since they're so used to the way things work when merging Ancestry records. Personally, I hate merging FamilySearch profiles with my tree because it can create multiple desperately formatted source citations, since non only is a commendation for the profile itself created, but also citations for all the citations in the profile. For example, when I merged the profiles for Oleta Arthurholt, five citations were created, two for the contour itself (one beingness redundant), ane for the 1920 US Census, one for the Social Security Decease Alphabetize, and one for the Washington expiry alphabetize. None of the citations were formatted very well, and technically it would not be correct to cite the latter iii straight unless you personally examined the sources. Otherwise, you should cite them indirectly via the FamilySearch Family Tree profile. I would be much happier to merge one historical record at a time.
ten. The Roll Back Changes feature is a good start and can be very useful for rolling back a bunch of changes at in one case. However, to make it more useful, it would exist better if information technology were possible to curlicue dorsum one or more changes without having to disengage all of the ones before them. For example, I have the post-obit changes in my log:
Changes
Changes1820 The states Federal Demography
Replace SourceMarija Roskovenski
Set Too Known As Description to 'Roskovenska'
Allow's say I only desire to disengage the "Set Too Known As Description" for Marija Roskovenski; only I can't do that unless I besides undo all the other changes before information technology. Of course, I can as well merely edit information technology again, just sometimes that's hard to do if I added a whole co-operative by mistake or something similar that.
Also, some of the changes are not very specific, equally you can meet. I have no idea what "Changes > Changes" are. The changes that are listed in the log need to be equally specific every bit possible and so that if I expect for them in guild to undo them, I can find them.
Those are the primary new features of FTM 2019, but it also appears to work more smoothly and reliably than any of its predecessors. I have used information technology for many hours on my 2012 Macbook Pro without any freezes, crashes, or problems syncing with Ancestry.com. I also used the Windows version for several hours and did not experience whatsoever bug with it, either. Nevertheless, at that place are a few new bugs in FTM 2019, also equally a few onetime ones that still oasis't been squashed.
New Bugs
Ane change is that FTM 2019 no longer stores your Beginnings.com login information as it did in previous versions. In add-on, Beginnings.com logs out occasionally and seemingly at random, forcing you to notice your login credentials and log back in. This seems to affect simply the Mac version.
Another new bug is that Edit>Detect and Replace (CMD-F/CTRL-F) does not work properly anymore in the Mac version, although it still works on Windows. It can find first names or last names by themselves and places, but it can no longer find both get-go and last names or any dates.
A few small bugs in the Web Search workspace for FamilySearch include the statement "No results found" always beingness displayed, fifty-fifty when there are possible historical records (both Mac and Windows), and the "Upload Memory" push on FamilySearch non working when adding a new memory source (Mac but).
Old Bugs
Distinct from Edit>Find is Edit>Find Individual; it didn't work in FTM 2017 and still doesn't work in FTM 2019 (Mac only). The "Locate in the Tree" button is e'er greyed out and non clickable, so you cannot apply this dialog window to notice a person.
A minor irritant in FTM 2019 for Mac that carried over from FTM 2017 is that in the Person tab of the People workspace, the year of death is cut off when there's a long twelvemonth of nascency (east.g., Bet. 1741-1750). In the example, the year of expiry was 1849, but most of it is cut off. The Windows version doesn't display complete years of birth or decease at all; instead of showing Bet. 1741-1750, information technology simply shows 1741, which really isn't correct.
Another badgerer is that there are still some problems with the Web Clipping function in Web Search, especially in the Mac version:
1. The text "Click here for more help with spider web clipping" is not hyperlinked to any help folio. On the Windows version, the link takes you lot to the Family Tree Maker home folio rather than a aid folio virtually Web Clipping.
two. The grayness text in the Web Clipping box in the Mac version is barely distinguishable from the grayness background, which is not good for people with visual disabilities
3. The state of the Web Clipping button when off versus on is hard to distinguish in both versions – as well bad for people with visual disabilities. The tool tip text provides no clue, since information technology ever says "Enable Web Clipping" whether it's already enabled or not
Another sometime bug is that FTM for Mac always tries to sync PDF files that are also big. The article, "FTM 2017 — What's Not Synced with FamilySync," states: "PDF files uploaded to or downloaded from Ancestry Member Trees cannot exceed 20MB." This is also in the Companion Guide. PDF files that exceed 20 MB should be ignored and not included in the Sync Change Log.
More of a user interface (UI) blueprint flaw than a problems is the fact that in the Media workspace for both versions, the Notice/Search box serves no useful purpose for the All Media or By Media Category lists. It cannot be used to find a media file by caption title. In the All Media list, it tin merely be used to find the words "Photos" or "Stories," and in the Media Category listing, it can just exist used to search for a category the user has in their tree, such as "Books." At that place really should be a way to search for a media item by explanation, date, or description within the Media workspace, rather than having to use the global Find and Replace function.
Another bug is that for imported GEDCOM files, FTM does not import EVEN tags if they practise non have TYPE tags. For instance, MacFamilyTree produced a GEDCOM containing the following structure:
i Even trial 2 DATE 12 Sep 1798 ii PLAC Old Bailey,London,England,Uk Patently FTM expects a TYPE tag after the Fifty-fifty tag line, just the Type tag is not required past GEDCOM Standard 5.5.1, so FTM should import the event as something like an "other," "miscellaneous," or "uncategorized" upshot. However, FTM ignores the structure without giving any warning in the import log. (Thanks to reader Peter McGregor for pointing out this problem.)
Pet Peeves
For a xxxthursday anniversary update, you might think that FTM 2019 would accept gotten a fresh new look, but aside from boosted buttons and dialog windows for new features, the UI of FTM has inverse very little since 2007, when Ancestry.com released the redesigned FTM 2008. Apparently Software MacKiev's primary endeavor went into making sure the 10 new features listed above worked well.
Source: Net Archive Wayback Machine
I would recall that a mature 12-twelvemonth-one-time UI would work flawlessly and hands, merely information technology does not. I already mentioned some UI issues in the "Old Bugs" section, simply here are a few more:
- At that place is no option to paste text as unformatted in places where formatting is allowed, primarily notes for a Person, Fact, Media, or Source. If you copy some text from a source that is formatted, information technology will exist pasted with the formatting intact, unless you strip out the formatting starting time. Any application that deals with formatted text should take a menu item to paste text as unformatted or to match the existing text.
- Find Missing Media Defaults to Attach>Copy, and there is no manner easily to alter them all to Attach>Link. The but way to change them is to click on each item and change it individually. In my instance, I had 3623 items to change!
- There'south no way to filter on, search for, or report on Private facts, media and notes. Currently information technology'southward possible to mark these items equally private, but there's no way to go back subsequently and find everything that is marked "private." A workaround is to export to GEDCOM and search for RESN tags, merely that'southward not a satisfactory solution. It would be nice to observe them from within FTM, and it doesn't seem like it should exist that hard.
- There's no Night Mode, which has been supported since Sep 2018 for macOS Mojave (ten.fourteen) and Oct 2018 for Windows 10. Dark Style uses less electricity on most modernistic displays, is easier on the eyes, and is preferred past many users. All modern apps should back up Night Style.
- Web URLs in source citations are exported to the user-defined _LINK tag in GEDCOM files. While not incorrect, this is also not ideal, since no other apps are required to import them. In fact, many other apps and websites exercise non import them, so much of this important information is lost. Prior to FTM 2017, spider web URLs were exported using the Annotation tag, which is a much better choice.
- FTM 2019 still is not 100% compliant with the latest GEDCOM 5.five.1 standard used to exchange data between dissimilar family unit tree apps and websites, despite a commitment from Software MacKiev to make information technology and then in 2016 for FTM 2017. Later on some changes in the dot 1 updates to FTM 2014 and 3 and a few more in FTM 2017, there has been no further progress on the GEDCOM front.
Overall Cess
So is FTM 2019 worth paying the full price of $79.95 or the regular upgrade price of $59.95? If you already have FTM, and then I retrieve it's definitely worth upgrading, specially if you tin can get information technology on sale (currently information technology'southward $49.95, but that could go up or downwardly). FTM 2019 is more stable than its predecessors, and while 7 of the 10 new features seem rather trivial to me, the Coil Back Changes, Smart Filters, and TreeVault features seem worth the upgrade. Software MacKiev has posted a FTM Version Comparison Table for versions 16 through 2019 showing which versions have the latest features, such as standard source templates (introduced in FTM 2010). It might aid those with older versions decide if they want to upgrade. Although Beginnings® Hints, Search, and Merge were introduced in FTM 2012 (FTM 2 for Mac) as TreeSync, they were replaced with FamilySync in FTM 2017 and no longer piece of work in before versions (thanks to Jack Minsky for pointing that out).
If yous don't currently have FTM, then whether it's worth $79.95 for the full version depends on your operating organisation and if you need to sync with an online family unit tree website. As a Mac and Beginnings.com user, I chose FTM for my program, but if you utilise Windows similar the majority of the world, you lot might consider something else like RootsMagic, which will exist releasing version 8 in the near time to come at a price slightly higher than $29.95 unless you buy information technology before it's released. RootsMagic also can sync with Ancestry.com and has FamilySearch integration and good GEDCOM 5.5 compliance, but I didn't care for the UI of version 7 or the way it handles source citations. The UI of version 8 looks a little better than 7. Y'all can read my full review of version 7 here.
FTM 2019 Rollout
Software MacKiev is sending out ten,000 emails at a time to those who pre-ordered FTM 2019, in the order the copies were purchased. This is and so they don't overwhelm the TreeVault cloud service servers, which must create new accounts and upload trees for the first time. Until you lot get your notification e-mail (assuming y'all pre-ordered), you can get your trees set for the upgrade past compacting the files and backing up your trees.
Disclosure: I paid the pre-order upgrade price of $29.95 for FTM 2019.
*Software MacKiev, the Software MacKiev logo, TreeVault, Emergency Tree, Next of Kin, Historical Weather condition and FTM Connect are trademarks, and Family Tree Maker, the Family Tree Maker Logo, FamilySync, the FamilySync logo, Photograph Darkroom, and Sync Weather Report are registered trademarks of The Software MacKiev Company. Ancestry is a registered trademark of Ancestry.com Operations, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their corresponding owners.
Source: https://genealogytools.com/family-tree-maker-2019-released-a-review/
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