:: C R E A T I V E G E N E ::

This is probably going to sound like a rant but I don't really mean it to. I wouldn't have even thought to write this article but Susan Clark asked me to. ;-) Her question was, "Why do you use a genealogy database program?" It seems to be a popular topic these days as just yesterday someone else introduced the topic on their Google+ page. There must be something in the air. For what it's worth, here's my two cents.

I have both Legacy Family Tree and Roots Magic on my desktop computer. I'm currently using Legacy and I occasionally play around with Roots Magic. When I first got interested in genealogy (many, many moons ago) I used Family Tree Maker and I was quite happy with it. But then as my database grew I continually got frustrated with its limited search capabilities. That's when I switched over to Legacy. I think I was using FTM 5.0 at the time. I'm sure their search capabilities have improved since then but at the time they weren't adequate. I don't remember which version Legacy was on at the time but I know I've upgraded at least a couple of versions since then. I'm currently using Legacy 7.5, Deluxe Edition.

I have a love/hate relationship with Legacy. I love that it is such a rich program and offers many reports styles, copy and paste of events (a big favorite of mine), source templates, and vast search capabilities. At the same time I hate Legacy because it is such a rich program (in this instance that's a nice way of saying complicated) that in spite of my many years of genealogy research, being pretty darn techo savvy, and having a basic understanding of how databases work, I still find myself far too frequently unsuccessful at getting what I want out of the program.

I have never mastered tagging and yes, I bought the DVD and watched it. It seems like a cool and helpful tool but I can't seem to remember how to use it. By that I mean that it isn't intuitive even after having watched the video. Whenever I want to try tagging again I have to pull out and sit through the video again because the sequence of steps involved doesn't make sense to me. I also have never mastered searches and this is probably the most frustrating thing for me. Sometimes I get names that have nothing to do with my search parameters and sometimes I'll get results that don't contain a person who I know has info that should land them in the results but doesn't. And yes, I bought that DVD and watched it too.

Sadly, these aren't my biggest complaints with Legacy. My biggest complaint has to do with needing to under utilize the program because I lose stuff when I upgrade to a new version. For quite some time now, I have been only entering data and sources into Legacy. I'd love to link photos and documents to individuals in the database but I've done that a couple times before only to lose all that work somewhere along the way... probably during an upgrade. One day they're there the next day they are gone. True I can re-link them but I get tired of trying to remember which of my hard drives a given file folder is on. And no, Legacy can't seem to find it among my several drives either. I finally gave up and I just use the most basic functionality. I could buy yet another DVD that would probably tell me what I'm doing wrong but I'm tired of spending money on learning this program. I'm just not willing to do it anymore.

Just a few days ago I updated to the latest version of Legacy 7.5, the one that has the 1940 Census tools in it. Once the new version was installed my color settings had reverted to the default and Baptism had reverted to Christening. Big deal? No. But it makes me think that if I'd had links to photos and documents those settings might have reverted to default too. And then I'd be frustrated trying to find them again.

Am I content with Legacy? It may sound like I'm not but actually I am. Once I accepted that mastering it is more trouble than it's worth it and I lowered my expectations of what I can expect out of it I find that I am content. You won't hear me singing its praises but I don't steer people away from it when they ask me what software I'm using and if I'd recommend it. The way you enter data in it makes sense to me. I find it pretty easy to do. The choice of reports is nice. The company's webinars are well done and quite informative. I liked the charting better in Family Tree Maker but that's personal preference. There are some very nice charts available in Legacy.

If I could change one thing about Legacy, do you know what that would be? Not any of the things I've mentioned so far. What I'd really like to see in Legacy is the ability to use the Polish keyboard so I can enter my long and lovely, consonant-laden Polish surnames WITH the diacritical marks that are a part of the Polish language. Maybe some day. And on that day... you'll hear me singing its praises!!!

I know what you're thinking... what about Roots Magic? I play with it from time to time but it just doesn't feel intuitive to me. I have to look and look to find things. They never seem to be where I think they should be. And the GUI is visually confusing to me. Too many lines, not enough boxes.

So now back to Susan's question... "Why do you use a genealogy database program?" I use it for organization. First and foremost it's a way to organize and reference the names, events, and dates of the people on my family tree and the sources where I found that information. Legacy does that for me and the basic data entry required is easy for me to do.

Thanks for asking, Susan!

There's a very good article about custom-printed photobooks in the November issue of Popular Photography magazine. The article, by Debbie Grossman, reviews 10 photo book services and gives a few tips and tricks too. Here's a synopsis of their findings:

"Most companies use just one kind of paper, but some--Blurb and Mpix, among them--give you choices." Only 4 companies offered dust jackets. They gave Snapfish the thumbs down for lacking endpapers (inside cover liners) and thought the best endpapers are offered by Aperture. MyPublisher has nice ones too.

"Most services charge a set price for the first 20 or so pages, then add a dollar per page after that. Blurb goes by range, starting with up to 40 pages, and going up in increments of 40 more. In book publishing, two pages equals a single sheet of paper: a 20-page book will have 10 sheets of paper, plus the endpapers, and is therefore surprisingly thin."

In terms of design tips, the article recommends choosing a variety of types... landscapes, portraits, and details and then editing your photos before you begin. They thought Aperture, MyPublisher, and Blurb had the cleanest and most elegant designs; "...Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Kodak Gallery were more biased toward themes for occasions like a new baby, wedding, or holiday." Picaboo is oriented towards digital scrapbookers.

It's difficult to control for color in printing photo books and their test books gave a range of results. They noted that, "Some services, like Kodak's, automatically perform some corrections, adding what looks like contrast, sharpness, and possibly some color correction--we were extremely pleased with the results."

They tried out the various software provided by the services and found MyPublisher's to be "particularly fun to use". Many of the services will automatically populate your pages but they had varying degrees of success with that feature.

Their conclusion: "We'd hoped to find a clear winner, but, while there were standouts, no one company excelled at everything from book creation to binding to print quality. Aperture was one of the best, with a simple creation process and a great binding. Kodak's print quality beat all the books with traditional paper. And Adorama is up there, with good software and beautifully printed images. MyPublisher did well all-around too."

Here's how the 10 photo book services were rated by the folks at Popular Photography magazine:

**** (4 stars)
Aperture, Kodak, MyPublisher

***+ (3.5 stars)
Adorama, Smilebooks

*** (3 stars)
Blurb, Shutterfly

**+ (2.5 stars)
Mpix

** (2 stars)
Snapfish

*+ (1.5 stars)
Picaboo

For more details, I recommend reading the article in its entirety.

I have a paid subscription to Popular Photography magazine. I was not asked to mention the article or the magazine by Bonnier Corporation of New York, publisher of Popular Photography magazine, nor was I compensated for doing so. I could potentially be compensated by Amazon.com if you were to click on the link in the article and purchase a subscription to the magazine. I have used both Shutterfly and MyPublisher photo book services and was pleased with the results of both. They have not compensated me for my comments either. 

Picasa 3 (beta) has been out for a couple weeks now. Who's been playing with it?

I have! I have!

Picasa has long been my photo viewer of choice. I own both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but for locating photos on my hard drive, down sampling photos to put on my blog, and quick and light editing, Picasa is my program of choice. I use it every day without exception. So when version 3 was released in beta I was quick to download it and start putting it through its paces.

There are a slew of new features but I'm just going to touch on a couple of my favorites.

The absolute best new feature, as far as I'm concerned, is the ability to add watermarks to photos. Once upon a time I used to put my signature on all the photos I used on my blog. But then I got lazy. It seemed like too much of a hassle to launch Photoshop just to add my signature to a photo, especially in posts that included several photos. Eventually I stopped adding my signature at all when I posted photos. But I never got comfortable with the idea. Now with Picasa 3 it's simple. You set it up once, and a watermark is automatically included on each photo that you designate. :-) If you've noticed my name and date on the lower right corner of the photos in my recent posts then you've seen the result. This feature is winner in my book!

Another new feature I like is the ability to add text to photos. Here's an example of what I mean.
The text tool is easy to use and allows you to preview the font style on the fly. You can also rotate text, add an outline, and change the transparency. Sometimes it's helpful to be able to label the names of people in group photos. Trying to list the names of people left to right, back row to front, in a caption can be a bit of challenge. This new tool will make it easy to add a name right on a photo for easy identification. :-)

Here's an example. I took this photo...

To this...

... in less than 5 minutes! It's just that easy with Picasa.

1. Open the picture in Picasa and under the "Basic Fixes" tab click "I'm Feeling Lucky" (It does auto color and contrast).
2. Under the "Effects" tab click "Sharpen" (old photos are often "soft" and can benefit from sharpening).
3. Back to the "Basic Fixes" tab, click on "Text". Type your text on the photo and choose a font that you like. You can adjust the size and choose a color. In this case, I sampled colors from the photo itself for all but the muted pink in the title at the bottom.
4. Click on "File" then "Export Picture to Folder", choose your watermark, and save your file in the size of your choice. Done!

So there's no excuse for using flat, faded, old photos on your blog when you can create a crisp clear picture (the way the photographer intended it to be!) with the people labeled and your watermark on it in less than 5 minutes!

Picasa is a free download! Picasa is a free download! Picasa is a free download!

(No, I don't get any money for promoting it... I'm just trying to give you a tip for great looking old photos in minutes!) Windows only.

The folks over at Adobe, creators of the Photoshop suite of products, have a new offering. It's the new Photoshop Express, an online photo editing and storage program. It's just been launched and is still in beta but you can set up an account and check it out now now. I took it for a spin this morning myself.

When you register, you get to choose your screen name which is included in the URL of any online albums you might choose to make public. My URL is http://Jasia.photoshop.com. That's pretty cool isn't it?

Once you register and go through the email verification process, you can login and begin uploading photos. I uploaded just one, a photo of the front grill of Big Blue (Stephanie Plum fans will recognize this as Grandma Mazur's car). One photo is enough to play with for testing purposes but you're not limited to that. Each account gets 2GB of file storage space.

The GUI resembles the current version of PSE6 having a charcoal background. But the program is not an online version it. Think more along the lines of the Photoshop Elements look with the Picasa feature set. As one who has and uses both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements regularly believe me when I say this is not "Photoshop Lite", it's more like "Picasa Dark".

The Photoshop Express feature set offers basic photo editing tools including, cropping, red eye removal, sharpening, tinting, lighting, saturation and such. Nothing remarkable about the tool set offered but the way it works is pretty interesting. In the screen shot below you can see what I mean.

In this instance, I've clicked on the "saturation" tool. Above the photo there appears a series of 7 thumbnails showing various levels of saturation. The center image is the original and you get to see 3 less saturated images and 3 more saturated images. That's kind cool. If you find one you prefer, all you have to do is click on it to accept it.

I think the GUI is very user friendly and pretty intuitive. I'm not sure I discovered every feature but I was able to get around the program without having to look for a Help menu. When in doubt, mouse-over the image or one of the tools or buttons and you'll usually get a pop-up suggestion. Oh, and you definitely want to "allow pop-ups" in your browser window for this site.

You can assign your photos to an "album" and you can choose to make your album public, private, or by invitation only. You can also view your photos in a slide show or send them by email.

Adobe comes in pretty late the to online photo editing/storage game and Photoshop Express doesn't have any new compelling features from what I've seen. They are asking for feedback though and they make it sound like they intend to offer more features in the future. I let them know what I think the program's missing... the ability to watermark photos with a copyright notice. I don't think any of the online photo editing/storage programs offer this feature and that surprises me. I think it would dramatically cut down on image copyright violation on the web if they came up with a one-step watermark. The other feature this program needs is the ability to add keywords (IPTC). Gotta have it.

I hope that the introduction of Photoshop Express gets the people at Picasa to sit up and take notice. They haven't added much of anything to their product in ages and that's been a real disappointment for me. I use Picasa every day but I also almost always have to use additional programs for minor features that Picasa should have.

The fact that the program is online is both an advantage and a disadvantage. For those who want to access photo editing tools "on the go" it's great to have. For those who have huge collections of photos on their hard drives that they can't possibly upload, it won't be such a great thing since you have to upload a photo to edit it. (I fall into the later category.)

I didn't see anything in Photoshop Express to make me leave Picasa forever but if anyone could win me over with an advanced feature set for online photo editing/storage it would be the folks at Adobe. I hope they're listening.

DearMYRTLE recently wrote a blog post where she compared two private library cataloging web sites, Good Reads and LibraryThing. She asked for readers' feedback and then wrote a followup article. I wanted to comment at the time but was just too buried in my computer transition project to do it. But I'm going to share my thoughts now.

I have never used Good Reads. In fact, I'd never heard of it until DearMYRTLE mentioned it. So I'm in no position to comment on that one. Now Libary thing is a site I know something about. I wrote a review of it back in 2006. I stand by my review. It's a great site, and very easy to use. Do I still use it? No. {sheepish grin}

Sites like Good Reads and LibraryThing are only as good as your committment to keep them up. And while I think they're a great idea in theory, remembering to enter each and every new book when you get it makes it a little impractical, at least for me.

I entered all the genealogy/history books on my bookshelves back in 2006 when I wrote the review. It really didn't take very long (I had just over 100 books at the time) because the process is so automated. I put the LibraryThing widget on my blog and then pretty much forgot about it. After all, I don't buy new books every week (don't I wish ;-) so it was some time before I had a new book to enter. I didn't have reason to go back and actually use the search function to look up any of my books. When I wanted to use one I just walked over to my book shelves and picked it out.

Somewhere down the line it occurred to me that I had gotten some new books since I'd initially catalogued my library. The problem was, I couldn't remember which ones. "Oh well", I thought, "I'll look over my bookshelf when I get a chance." But I didn't make time when there were just "a couple" new books. Since that time I've added many new books to my library and now the task of locating them to add them to my catalogue has become a "one of these days" project ("one of these days" projects never seem to make it to my to-do list).

I think if I'd made use of the search function at LibraryThing on a regular basis (or even once) and found it helpful I would have been more committed to maintaining an accurate catalogue. But I haven't made use of it so it has become rather unimportant to me. And once the catalogue becomes out of date, its usefulness is diminished.

Like so many other things, private library catalogues are only as good as the committment of the person who has to maintain them. Mine isn't very good anymore. But I still think the concept is a good one and I probably will update my catalogue "one of these days" ;-)

Have you ever noticed how some people are math/science talented and others seem to excel more with verbal and written language skills? I happen to fall into the later category but I've always admired those from the other camp. And even more than that, I admire those who are talented in both arenas. There aren't many of those individuals out there, you know, the ones who understand the math/science really well and can explain/discuss it with their peers as well as with those of us who aren't comfortable with formulas and proofs. They make it understandable, make it make sense. Blaine Bettinger is one of those people.

Blaine writes about genetic genealogy. If you haven't read his blog, The Genetic Genealogist, you're missing out. He has a way of explaining the various facets of genetic genealogy in a way that I can understand it (at least most of the time ;-) . He can make that scientific stuff relevant to my genealogy research. I haven't had my DNA analyzed yet but I'm planning on it. I'm not intimidated by the idea any more. I've learned about a number of companies that offer the tests, the limits of what the results will indicate, and resources where I can look for more information... all from Blaine's blog. And if I get stuck along the way, I know I can post a question on his blog or send him an email and he will help me find my way.

I recommend you check out Blaine's blog if you are the least bit curious about genetic genealogy. You'll be surprised at how understandable it can be. (Take it from one who is scientifically challenged!)