Memories defaulting to public viewership

tylercritchfield

When I created the tree for my family group and copied over the living profiles from my own tree, the existing memories that also copied over were public memories by default. I have had to change each one individually to be private to the group. Is there an easier way to do this? Or can we make them private by default?

Alan E. Brown

A clarification: when you copy profiles from your own tree to the Family Group Tree, you are not copying memories. Those memories exist independent of any tree and have their own privacy settings. Copying profiles has no effect on the privacy settings. All that happens when you copy profiles to your FGT, and those profiles are tagged to memories is that there are additional tags created to tag the memories to the newly-created FGT profiles. So if your memories were public before you copied profiles to your FGT, they will still be public.

That said, there is a somewhat hacky approach that can help you do some bulk changes. When you attach a collection of memories to a FGT profile, and those memories are public, and you are the creator of each of those memories, you are given the option to set the privacy on all of those memories at once to be Private for the FGT (or multiple FGTs if you participate in more than one).

To do this:

1. You need to have a living FGT profile to copy the memories to. You may want to create a temporary profile that you will delete at the end.
2. Go the Memories tab for that profile.
3. Click ADD MEMORIES
4. Click Add Photo or Document
5. Glick GALLERY (to the right of "Add from")
6. Select several memories to attach. Note that you can only do up to 10 memories at a time. Note also that if you have a large number of memories to update, you may find it helpful to add them to an album ahead of time to make it easier to find the desired memories in this step.
7. Click ADD
8. Click Make Private (should be already selected)
9. Click SAVE VISIBILITY
10. Make sure your FGT group is selected (I am in only one FGT, so mine was selected by default), then click DONE.
11. Your memories will be made private to the group.
12. If you are doing more than 10, repeat steps 3-10 as needed.
13. If you created a temporary profile in step 1, remember to delete that profile when you are done.

This is a bit of a tedious process, but might save you some time if you want to change a significant number of memories from Public to Private (to a FGT group).

AnneLoForteWillson

@tylercritchfield As @Alan E. Brown explained, there is not currently the ability to set a whole bunch of memories that are tagged to profiles in the FamilySearch Tree switched to private when you copy the profiles into your family group tree. If you add them as memories to a profile, the system does give you the option to switch the whole set at once. Note that currently, for some reason, you can only add 10 memories at a time to a profile.

The ability to do a bulk change to private has been requested previously and the engineers are aware of the request. I will add your request to the number so they can see how many people are wanting this change. Thank you for your help in making this tool better!