First Gedcom upload
Hi,
I am new to CET after seeing a presentation from Robert Kehrer, and have just uploaded my first Gedcom. I have a lot of experience testing software so some of my comments might be repetitive of previous comments.
I used a real study Gedcom that was created from Legacy Version 10.0. It had about 3500 people and had been well scrubbed to remove errors.
I did not time the upload, but I found it unconscionably long. I have another Gedcom that is part of the same study that is about 15,000 people and I would hesitate to guess how long that will take to upload.
I got the message "Some of the data in this GEDCOM file was not uploaded correctly. View imported tree differences."
1/ One of the people called out had message "Unknown Type: Some of this person's information could not be added." That is nice but it would be more helpful to have a way to see exactly what that data that could not be added was. I noted that one of the Custom Events only showed up in the Notes.
2/ When I went to that person in my tree, it showed me that it had a possible duplicate in the FamilySearch Tree. It would be useful if a link could be included to the person in the FS FT.
3/ in checking some of the profiles, I note that media links are included in the note section, but I am unclear how to add the media.
4/ I am trying to determine why some people appear not to have been uploaded.
I hope some of these comments are useful
john.
Comments
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@johnlisle1 Thank you for your interest in and your assistance with testing early access CET. I have made the engineering team aware of these issues:
- The length of time that your upload took;
- the error that this person's information could not be added;
- Media links are included in the notes section;
- some persons appear to not have been uploaded; and,
- possible duplicate from FST showed.
At this time, a known bug is causing the "possible duplicate" in FST message.
And, media links are not supported in CET
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Thank you for your comments. How are we to add media to our trees? Personally, your Gedcom import needs to be as comprehensive as that done by TNG with the ability to over-write intelligently an existing Gedcom with an updated Gedcom. A user using a personal tree on an application that does not (yet, ever) support CET sync, is going to need that capability. The media feature could be a more distant add on, but the Gedcom update is going to be needed when you roll out this product as most of the desktop applications will not be ready in time. And you do not want to be seen as favoring specific desktop apps.
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I think you need to have a feature, again like TNG, where user custom events types can be properly associated with profile and marriage events.
I am doing some testing to see if some of the current Roots Magic and Legacy features like Shared Events, Stories, and Hashtags are usefully imported into CET.
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John,
- Thanks for signing up and for providing some feedback. Here's a few thoughts.
1) Length of upload and processing: The time it takes to upload the file from your hard drive to FamilySearch is usually measured in seconds to minutes depending on the size of file and internet bandwidth. Once FamilySearch has the file it begins a processing step that creates people for all the individuals in your file, hooks them up in relationships and then adds all the genealogical data. Experience is that this processing step handles about 10,000 persons/hour. Thus a 15,000 person Gedcom should take about 90min before you have a tree that you can begin working in. That time may vary depending on the total load on the system, especially the number of persons uploading Gedcoms simultaneously.
2) Upload Errors: There will always be times that our system can't determine what to do with certain data. These can be caused by many different things. Common examples include: - 3rd party software doing clever things with the Gedcom standard
- Instances where FamilySearch requires data not required by 3rd party software (ex. a residence place on a residence event)
- Data placed in unexpected fields
Over the last couple months the software engineers have eliminated many of the errors by adding 3rd party specific code, filling in "Unknown" on empty fields. Probably 80-90% of the previous errors no longer occur. We are still working on making them more actionable.
3) Rich Media in Gedcom: Gedcom 5.5.1 does not accommodate in the inclusion of rich media files. V7 does allow a product to .zip rich attachments into the file format, but unfortunately very few leading software products export v7 Gedcom files yet. As the v7 file standard becomes more common, we anticipate enhancing the upload to support the v7 enhancements. Likely the reason that your uploaded Gedcom only has references to the media files is that they could not be included and FamilySearch just displayed the reference that your software put into the Gedcom file. The real solution to this problem will be solved in coming months as leading 3rd party tools release updated versions of their software that are integrated with CETs. They will be able to pass just about everything from the user's tree in their product into the CET, including the images and other docs.
4) People not Uploaded: This would be a pretty serious bug. If you have specific examples of persons you know to be in the Gedcom, but who were not placed into the CET, we will want to file a bug and triage this.Can you first double check the gedcom (you can usually open it in a word processor and search for the person name) and make sure the person was exported into the file, then provide the name of the file and the approx date and time of your upload. I'm assuming your user name on FamilySearch is Johnlisle1. We'll have our software engineer pull the file and try to determine what happened.
0 - Thanks for signing up and for providing some feedback. Here's a few thoughts.
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Robert,
The study tree that I have loaded takes under 5 minutes to upload to TNG. And it is fully operational at the end of 5 minutes. If it is an update to an existing tree, whoever was replaced retains their unique ID number. I have to benchmark what I am doing with CET to what I do daily with TNG.
It took me 3-4 replacements before I got a fairly clean uploaded Gedcom. Some were subtle errors on my part in my Legacy original gedcom file. I do not believe when I did the final upload that anyone was missing. Of course, I have not checked everyone.
I do not know what you mean by "rich media files". Gedcom 5.5.1 surely does export links to media files. CET needs to support those links so that a user does not have to manually add all of their media again. I am trying to discern if a user imported a master source record or a source citation with a media attached what happens.
You need to consider knowing the special features of each vendor's Gedcoms and having special code to better interpret the vendor Gedcoms. I think most of the better genealogy programs do this to a greater or lesser extent.
I do not think you can wait for Gedcom 7. I think it will be a decade at least before the inventory of Gedcom 5.5.x goes away.
I noticed that preferred spouse and parent settings in my Legacy Gedcoms was not respected.
And more importantly, in a Tree, it was not obvious how to switch spouses.
john.
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@johnlisle1 Robert Kehrer requested additional information regarding "
"People not Uploaded: This would be a pretty serious bug. If you have specific examples of persons you know to be in the Gedcom, but who were not placed into the CET"
Please let us know the name/PID of a few deceased individuals. If the individuals at issue are living, please send a private message to me with the name/PID. Thank you
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Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’re committed to resolving as many issues as possible, but unfortunately, the report did not include enough information for us to investigate further. Since no additional details were provided, we’re closing this discussion for now. If you or others encounter this issue again, please start a new discussion and include relevant information such as your operating system, browser, URLs, and screenshots if available.
We appreciate your support and engagement. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any future questions or concerns.
Thank you for using CET.
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