How to remove photos from Memories without deleting them from FamilySearch?
How can I remove photos from my Memories app gallery, but not delete them from the FamilySearch pages I have posted them to? For instance, I take take lots of photos for Findagrave and BillionGraves and sometimes post them to FamilySearch also. But I don't want to save those photos any more on my phone, taking up space; I only want them to be on the person's FamilySearch page. When I try to delete them from my Memories app on my phone, it also deletes them from their FamilySearch page! What should I do? Do I archive them? - If so, does that take up a bunch of storage space on my phone? Can FamilySearch please develop a method of deleting them from Memories without deleting them completely from the whole program?
Today I "deleted" about 170 of these random photos from my Memories, only to discover they were also gone from the person's FamilySearch page. Is there an easy way to restore them? Can I un-delete them now? Do I have to go back and do each one individually?
Best Answers
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To answer your first question, the Archive feature is precisely what you are looking for. When you archive a memory, it will no longer appear in the My Memories area of your Gallery, but it will still appear in the Memories section for any persons in Family Tree that are tagged in those Memories. And if you change your mind, you can always go to "My Archive" in your Gallery (called "Archive" in the mobile Memories app) to select Memories and move them back to "My Memories."
As for your phone storage, I believe that the Memories app will only add them to your local storage if you visit the Archives section of the app. And the space they take initially will only be the space used by the thumbnail version of the photo, which is a tiny fraction of the full image size -- they only start taking the full size if you drill down to see the full photo.
And to answer your final question, yes, you can get your photos back. Just go to the Recently Deleted area, select the photos you want to restore, and restore them (you can use multi-select to restore them, so this shouldn't be too painful). You have 120 days from the time you delete them to restore them. After that, they are gone forever.
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But, the bad new is -- when you delete them the tags, dates, locations and any album associations are removed. So you would need to add the person tags, dates, locations and any album associations back one by one.
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Im confused - I think the point here is that the person doesnt want to keep the photos on their phone - and wants to remove them
Removing them from the phone - should have no impact on FamilySearch Memories, and for that matter then I dont see the reason to have to move them to archive.
One should never delete photos from memories thinking that somehow that is freeing up phone storage. FamilySearch Memories is not using the storage on your phone.
if you take a photo on your phone - and then upload it to Memories - thats great
you could then delete the photo from the phone to reduce file usage on the phone - but that is NOT done by deleting it in FS memories.
Never delete anything in FS - thinking that somehow you are freeing up space on your phone. Rather go to the image utilities on your phone and delete them from there .
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Apparently, the Memories app does keep a copy of your Gallery in the app itself. The help center article I put the link for above starts out with the sentence, "If you have preserved many memories in the FamilySearch Memories mobile app, you may find that the app takes too much space on your phone or tablet."
I would assume that the purpose of this on-device cache is to allow off-line use of the app. This would allow you to take a photo directly in the Memories app of great-grandpa's cabin up in the woods where there is no wifi and no cell coverage and have it sync to FamilySearch when you are back in civilization. But I have not actually tested this so don't know for sure if that is how things work.
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yes - there is surely some caching "on your phone" - just like a browser caches stuff on your PC
and would be nice to know how to clear that cache
but whatever you do - don't delete photos in FS (app or web) - unless you really want them gone from Familysearch.
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According to the Help Center article, you can't. All you can do is move items from your Gallery into an Archive. Changing this might be a good suggestion for a future improvement to the app.
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Right but I still wouldn't recommend moving items from gallery to archive - because there are various other implications more than just what is being cached to the smart device. though if you take advantage of ALBUMS you should be able to go to the specific album and not have to wait for the entire gallery to finish displaying.
but this is totally apart and disjoint from trying to save space used by photos you took on the device and then uploaded to FS memories - which local copies on the device could be deleted -and space saved without any impact on FS Memories.
Just seems to me two very disjoint issues are being intermingled here.
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There are indeed two different issues being discussed here (actually 3, which I'll get to at the end of this comment). They are not completely unrelated, but we do need to be clear about what the goals are, and what effects the different actions will have.
Archiving photos will move them from "My Memories" to "My Archive". That will have the effect of reducing the size of the list of memories shown in "My Memories." That can be helpful in reducing the clutter in "My Memories", allowing you to focus that primary list on your active memories. This is true, whether you are doing your archiving on the website or on the app. Archiving will have no immediate effect on the amount of space used by the Memories app; in fact, it is likely to cause an increase in the space used by the app, since the process of archiving will likely use some additional cache in the app. But it could somewhat reduce the cache used by the app in the long term, if you clear your app's data, depending on the actions you take afterwards (see my next point).
The space actually used by the Memories app on your phone consists of these two elements:
- The space used by the app itself. That will be a constant, independent of any actions you take, as long as the app is installed on your phone.
- The data storage used by the app. This is primarily a cache of data downloaded from the FamilySearch servers. It will tend to increase as you use the app. For the Memories app, the first items cached tend to be the thumbnails used in any list you show (the list of photos in My Memories, or My Archive, or any album). These thumbnails are relatively small, but if you have hundreds (or thousands of memories), they can add up. The full-size images are only cached if you drill down to see the detailed view of a photo. There are a variety of other items that are cached (lists of tags and other metadata), but they tend to be relatively small compared with the actual photos (or audio clips or PDFs, if you have those).
You can free up space used by the Memories app by clearing your app's data. Everything that you do on the app is synced with the FamilySearch servers, so you won't lose anything if you clear the app's data. Then you can start fresh. But before doing that, I'd look at the space actually used by the app to make sure that this is a significant concern for your situation. It may well be that the app takes up far less space on your phone than you might imagine. After you clear the app's data, you'll have to sign in again, and over time as you use the app, the cache usage will gradually build up.
The third issue was raised by @Dennis J Yancey in his comment just before this one: "space used by photos you took on the device." This really has nothing to do with the Memories app. If you don't need those photos on your device anymore, you can remove them from your device, once you have safely synced them to iCloud or Google Photos or whatever cloud service you use to backup your photos.
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Thanks Alan for the great write up! :-)
as to the third item - that was my interpetation as to what the user themselves wanted when they said
" But I don't want to save those photos any more on my phone, taking up space"
but again it seemed like maybe they had considered that was the same as the items showing up in Memories which it is not.
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Answers
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Thank you so much for the explanations and suggestions!
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