A GEDCOM file is the moving box of genealogy. It lets you take your tree from one program to another. Until now, not everything fit in the box when you exported from PastPaths. Tags, categories, notes on relationships, and quite a few details about images and places were left behind. This week I changed that.

What comes along now?

Everything PastPaths keeps about people, relationships, events, places, sources, and images is included in the export. Among other things:

  • Tags and categories with color and description, even the ones you aren't using right now. The import tags come along too, so you can see where the information once came from.
  • Relationships with notes, dates, and source citations. Sibling relationships and the notes on parent relationships come along too.
  • Images with date, photographer, place, linked places, and the note about each person in the picture.
  • Places with all their details, even places no event uses yet. The place tree looks the same when the file is loaded into another PastPaths.
  • Sources with type, web addresses, repository, and call number.

GEDCOM is an old standard and doesn't have room for everything. What doesn't fit is written with PastPaths' own markers. Other programs skip them, but another PastPaths reads everything back. That means you can move between two computers, or share with a relative who also uses PastPaths, without losing anything. Only blog posts, bookmarks, and research notes stay behind. The backup takes those along.

Share safely still applies

When you hide living persons, only the tags, categories, and places that the shared records actually use come along. A tag called "Ask my aunt about my cousin's father" shouldn't end up with someone else by accident. A relationship to a hidden person isn't written either.

Small things along the way

  • Link existing event showed "No results found" before you had typed anything. Now it asks you to type at least two characters instead.
  • While working, I found a few buttons on the image cards that don't do anything and a couple of fields that have no place in the app. They're on the list for a later cleanup round.
  • At one point the export stopped working altogether. It turned out I had pasted code into the wrong file. Even a developer does that sometimes.

The manual

The guides on sharing with relatives and on moving from MyHeritage or Ancestry now explain what comes along. Backups and the FAQ have a comparison between a backup and a GEDCOM export. In short: the backup is for yourself, and GEDCOM is for sharing or switching programs.

What's next

I'm continuing with what affects the database and the import first. After that, I want to be able to mark where each person is in a picture, much like in TNG. That's especially handy for group photos where it's hard to know who's who.