Flag memories that have no tags - Warn users they need to tag every memory!
Am I the only one who thinks this is a major design flaw in the Memories Gallery? For some time now I've been happily uploading my memories (i.e. journaling) to the Memories Gallery in my account. I would tag other ancestors when appropriate, but much of the time not because there is no one else in the memory. All the time I thought I was saving my memories for posterity. Then I happened to look at the Memories tab under my person record to find none of my memories were there! I didn't know that I still had to tag myself even though I created the memories in my account.
If I use the Family Tree App, select my "person" and create a memory there, it automatically tags me. That's how I expected the Gallery to work.
I realize the system can't assume I want myself tagged in every memory I create, but since memories that have no tags are not easily found after the person dies, shouldn't the Gallery make it more obvious when a memory has no tags? Is there any point to creating a memory that doesn't have a tag?
I wonder how many other users are like me, thinking they are creating memories for their children to enjoy, only to have them disappear when they die and their account is locked?
When a memory doesn't have anyone tagged, it should be a big red flag - figuratively or literally. There should be something that makes it very clear that a memory will not show up for anyone unless it is tagged to someone.
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Why would you ever want to tag yourself in a memory that you are not connected other than you are the one doing the upload? I have inherited all kinds of physical stuff, the earliest of which is dated 1825. I have no desire to clutter up my own person page memories with hundreds of photos. Yes, I have uploaded over 600 memories to various person pages, and I don't consider myself very close to being done.
If I want to see all the photos I've uploaded I can do that by clicking Memories and then gallery, as you talked about. I have fixed the problem of memories with no tag. I have put like categories of memories in albums, tag or no tag, which can be accessed from many different person pages. In fact, I have a business ledger which is digitized and has entries and newspaper clippings spanning 1825 to the 1880s. Some of the images have no tags as I'm not sure who the people are that are mentioned. They are all in an album dedicated only to that ledger. I got a shared link to the album and added that link as a source in the person's source list who originally owned the store.
Please no flags for images with no tag. When I go to my gallery or the albums, images with no tags are labeled. So that already exists. The label says "Add tag".
That is a much better plan for the future of your images. If you die without sharing your login with someone, much if not all of the work you have done on your own person page could stay invisible forever.
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There's already a flag, as @Gail Swihart Watson mentioned. It's not literally a "big red flag" but figuratively it is a flag to help you distinguish which of your memories are tagged and which are not. Here's a small excerpt from my Gallery. The image on the right has been tagged and needs no further work. The image on the left seems important, but I haven't been able to identify just who is mentioned on it, so I'm still working on it. The "Add Tag" button lets me know that I still need to tag it at some point. That seems to fulfill that part of your suggestion nicely. (And in a similar vein, the "Add Title" button lets me know that it might be good to add a helpful title at some point.)
I also agree that it would be a significant problem to automatically tag all my uploads to the gallery and connect them to my person. The fraction of memories I've uploaded related to me is far less than 1%; I certainly don't want the 99% automatically tagged to me! It is sometimes helpful to upload a memory and then tag it later. This is particularly true when I upload in bulk. But the capability for auto tagging already exists. I simply go to the person in Family Tree and then on their Memories tab I do the upload there. I can even upload several images at a time if I have a set of photos that apply to the same person. This process is the exact analogue of the process you described when you said "If I use the Family Tree App, select my "person" and create a memory there, it automatically tags me."
So if you'll just adjust your procedures slightly to upload appropriate images directly to the person they apply to, I think you can be perfectly happy with the current capabilities. And in those cases where you upload a set of photos to the Gallery, you can use the "Add Tag" as a flag to let you know that you still have some tagging to do. And you can use the "Not Tagged" filter in the "Arrange" dropdown for the Gallery to quickly identify all of the memories that still need tags.
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I appreciate the comments, but I think you're missing my point. I thought when I add a memory to my gallery, that WAS adding to my person. There's nothing on the page to indicate otherwise. Yes there's the "Add Tag" icon on the memory, but that still doesn't say that's a problem or the memory isn't already "mine".
To answer @Gail Swihart Watson question - I have been using the Memories feature for my own journaling. I learned to do this from Rootstech. So I'm the one tagged in most of my memories.
I agree that auto-assigning everything in the gallery to "me" is not the answer. I can see how others would not want it to work that way. But I disagree with allowing a memory to have no one tagged. When a memory in the Gallery has no one tagged, that's a problem - a big problem in my mind. Having no one tagged makes the memory rather pointless. There's no indication on the page of that problem. THAT'S the problem.
A simple solution would be to make the "Add Tag" icon red, possibly with a popup note when you hover over that says "This memory is not assigned to anyone." - something like that.
If I were QA for Family Search (I had a career in software QA) I would start querying the database for un-tagged memories - especially for locked accounts (deceased persons) - to see how big a problem this is. I bet a lot of memories "slip into the night" when a person passes away - memories that will never be found because no one else knew they existed.
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