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(a photo and data CDROM) Note - this was my 2001 project, my first attempt at creating a genealogy CDROM with photos and gedcom data. It worked very well and much of the information here still applies to current projects.
My own way of doing this (other than posting my data on the Internet) is to release a yearly report, just before Christmas, to the relatives. In the past this has been a pure paper product, descendant charts, ancestor reports, kinship reports and the like. In 2001 my plan is to distribute a CDROM full of information to the relatives. Recently I came to the realization that much of what I do in terms of genealogy is put together information that was once in a single spot and has now been scattered among the generations. Photos are a good example. It appears that my great-grandfather had a large photo collection (he started his career as a photographer before moving into art). This collection got divided up amongst his sons and daughters who in turn have passed it down to their sons and daughters (my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins). Photographs aren't the only thing to get scattered. My sister has my grandmother's journal from when she went to college. A cousin has a series of papers written by my grandmother while she was at public school. I'm sure there are dozens more such items scattered about. So (I said to myself) - how can I, with the miracle of modern technology, put this information into a single package that can be duplicated dozens of times and scattered to all the living relatives. The answer is the CDROM. As noted at the beginning of this series of articles, we don't know where technology will be in 20, 50 or 100 years. So, all we can do is stay mainstream and hope that the products we produce will stand the test of time. Using that premise, I have settled on six main types of file formats: JPEG photos - discussed in detail on the storing digital photos pageThe first two have already stood the current test of time (JPEG almost 20 years old, ASCII is at least 30 years old), and given the explosion of the web, HTML is clearly a long term standard, PDF documents also appear to be headed that way and GEDCOM is a recognized standard in the genealogy world. The idea is to have the CDROM autoload an HTML document when inserted in the user's CD drive. This HTML index file will contain links to all the information on the CD. Accessing most of the data will involve the simple point and click of a mouse. The data will include:
I have several text documents, mostly family histories that have been converted over the years into word processing text. This was done mostly through the use of a flatbed scanner and OCR (Optical Character Recognition). I have the final documents stored as 3 data types - native word processing mode (Word 2000), rich text format (RTF format - viewable by essentially any word processor), and PDF document format (which retains all the original formatting). I will place all three document types on the CDROM (since I have lots of room). A word about PDF - in about 1998 Adobe offered a little PDF writer for $29.95US as a download from their website. I bought a copy and it has been a wonderful addition to my arsenal of genealogy software. It installed as a printer driver in Windows, so I can write PDF files from any program that can use a printer driver. The problem for people today is that Adobe doesn't seem to be offering this little PDF writer anymore (at least I can't find it on their website). The only other option to write PDF files is to buy the very expensive Adobe Acrobat software (which I recently did for reasons other than genealogy). If someone knows if Adobe's PDF Writer still exists, please let me know. 2002 Update: there are several new PDF file creators on the market, many inexpensive, some free. One such free one is PDF995 (www.pdf995.com). 2005 Update: a couple of other easy to use freeware offerings are PDF Creator (sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) and CutePDF (www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp). (my thanks to John Glueck for pointing these out to me). 2005 Update 2: another easy to use freeware offering with lots of features is PrimoPDF (www.primopdf.com) . A word about fonts - in any genealogical document, it is best to use standard fonts (Times New Roman, Arial) that are included with most PC computers. Most documents do not include the fonts when they are saved, it is assumed that those same fonts will be on the computer viewing the document. If they are not, your lovely formatted document will look rather wonky. A way around this is to "embed" your fonts into the document. For instance in Word, if you do a "Save As" you will find under General Options an option to "Embed Truetype Fonts". A warning is not all truetype fonts are embedable (this ability is up to the manufacturer of the font). The Adobe PDF writer (and Adobe Acrobat) also give you the ability to embed fonts within a PDF document. It will increase the file size a bit (most font sets are about 50K in size), but it will help to ensure that the document will look as you intended. I have recently completed a couple of projects where I scanned or digitally photographed old handwritten documents (a journal, school papers). The original images were saved as PNG image files, but they will be distributed on CDROM as high resolution JPEG files. The reason JPEG was chosen as a distribution mechanism is two-fold. The first is file size - a group of 120 JPEG images of 8.5" x 11" pages is considerably smaller than their PNG equivalent. The second reason is that the images will be viewable via an HTML document on the CDROM (only the most recent HTML browsers can understand PNG images while all browsers can view JPEG images).  A portion of a scanned journal page (reduced in size to fit this page) The reason HTML was chosen is based on the premise that 90 to 100% of my relatives who own a computer also have a web browser on that computer which means they can view HTML pages. I also write HTML, so I have set it up to look like the original journal, where they can page back and forth through the journal by using HTML links. HTML also has an advantage in that when it displays an image, it doesn't compress that image - the viewer is always looking at it full size. Many image viewing programs will squeeze the image into the viewable area. If you can't write HTML, an easy option is to use a program such as ThumbsPlus. This is the program I use to create thumbnail images of all my digital photos. It also has a handy feature in that it can write HTML pages of thumbnails which link to the original images. By using a naming convention that will properly order the pages (such as page001.jpg, page002.jpg, etc.), a viewer could "leaf through" the journal by using the thumbnail images. No knowledge of HTML is required to do this - the program does it automatically. I'm sure there are other programs that will do the same thing - Thumbsplus is the program I chose to buy.  Most of this section of my genealogy pages has dealt with what to do with photos. I am still debating on what exactly to do when I place photos on a CDROM for distribution to the relatives. A certainty is that photos will be included in two file sizes, one with a width of no more than 750 pixels and one at the original size, more suited for printing. The smaller file size is no problem, these will be JPEG files. ThumbsPlus will be used to create HTML pages with linked thumbnails of these images. A little freeware slideshow viewer (Vueslide) will also be included. The question is what to do with the original images. I'm thinking of the scenario where someone finds this dusty CDROM, fifty years from now. It would be nice if they could print the photos at the best quality possible. So my debate is whether to include them as minimum compression JPEG files (100% or Adobe quality 10), or a lossless format such as PNG. Given the quality of the original photos, I'm leaning to much smaller size JPEG files as having captured all the detail possible with negligible loss of quality. Many of the photos will have a caption section added to the bottom of the photo to identify who is in the photo and an text document (in both ASCII and RTF) will be included with a full listing of who is who in the photos. CD-ROM writers are quite inexpensive these days. As noted, I consider a CD-ROM writer a must for anyone serious about digital photography since the CD-ROM is the best way to store and preserve your precious photos. Almost everyone with a computer, has a CD-ROM reader, so a CD-ROM is also a great distribution mechanism. As a bonus, blank CDs are extremely inexpensive, it is much cheaper to distribute information on CD-ROM than it is on paper. A GEDCOM database will contain all the text data from your genealogy program. Most genealogy software program have the ability to save a GEDCOM file when doing a "Save As". This ".GED" file can then be easily loaded into any good genealogy program. See the notes in Software below regarding using GEDCOM data. Image Editing - I use Corel Photopaint (www.corel.com), a high end image processor that I happen to already own. However my camera (Canon) came with Adobe Photoshop LE (www.adobe.com) which is capable of most but the very sophisticated imaging needs (a neighbour's Nikon also came with Photoshop LE). The basic requirements of an image editor are to be able to rotate (at any angle), resize, do colour balance, adjust hue, adjust contrast and adjust saturation and adjust brightness. Most of the good editors can also accept colour profiles that will allow the matching of the colours on-screen with the colours produced by your particular printer. The image editor should also be able to read and write JPEG, TIF, and PNG files. Thumbnails - I use ThumbsPlus (www.cerious.com) a program exclusively designed to produce thumbnail images. I don't actually use it as a database program (which it can do), and in fact my camera also came with a (very slow) thumbnail database program. Instead I use it mainly to produce image pages of thumbnail images. This is my index system, I simply browse through these thumbnail images, locate the image I want and then load in the appropriate CD. Finding pictures is not an issue when you only have 100, but it is when you have 5,000. As noted Thumbsplus will also produce HTML thumbnail pages with small thumbnail pictures linked to the original full size images. I'm using these HTML thumbnails in addition to the browsable slide show (see below) so that the user can have a choice of how to access the photos. Browsable Slide Show - I was originally going to use Thumbsplus to produce HTML thumbnail pages for people to use to browse the image libraries. However this is quite a slow way to view all the images. So, I went looking through my graphics program for a simpler solution. I found it with Ulead PhotoExplorer (www.ulead.com). It can produce an HTML (web page) slide show of all the images in a single folder. Each image page has a links for "Home, Next, Prev, End" so the user can click through the entire folder of images. This makes is very easy to browse the images, a nice "point and click" solution. GEDCOM Data - an assumption has to be made that the recipient of your CDROM does not have a genealogy program. To make it very easy for the recipient to browser my full family tree, I used a GEDCOM to HTML (web page) converter to make web pages out of my entire family tree. I use a great little program called GED2WWW for posting data to my website because it produces a nice compact output. But for the CD, I'm not constrained by the size of the database and I wanted a more graphical output. So after some searching I settled on a nice little shareware program called GEDHTREE (www.gedhtree.com) which produces web pages with charts as well as family grouping pages. Now all my computer challenged relatives have to do is to point and click to view the entire family tree. For those who wish more power to browse the GEDCOM file I have included two programs on my distribution CD. The first is a neat little freeware program that runs directly from the CD (no software installation needed at the user end). It's not the best genealogy program I've seen, but it's free and doesn't require installation. It's called GENViewer and it can be used to create self viewing GEDCOM files. It's available from Mudcreek Software (www.mudcreek.ca) - they also sell commercial software, look for their freeware CD viewer (it only works from a CD). The second is a full blow freeware genealogy program, Personal Ancestor File, distributed by the Latter Day Saints. I have included the installation file on the CDROM and this can be used by the more computer literate to install on their own computer in order to view the GEDCOM file in detail. It is available from www.familysearch.org PDF Files - I have included the free PDF file viewer from Adobe (www.adobe.com). Many people will already have this installed on their computer, but in case they don't, the inclusion of this program on CD gives them the option to install it without having to download it from the web. I use Adobe Acrobat to produce my PDF files however there are several other options, including a couple of free options such as PDF995 (www.pdf995.com). In addition, a few genealogy programs are now including the option to produce PDF files. Autorun HTML files - The real trick with the CD is to make it as easy to use as possible. Based on this I wanted to have the CD autorun the index HTML file so that when the user puts the CD in their computer, the main index page will come up and all they have to do it to point and click to view the photos. Unfortunately the Windows "autorun.inf" file does not have the capability to directly run an HTML file. Fortunately there are several little programs that can be used to do this. The one I chose is a little affordware program called WinOpen which can be used to autorun an HTML (or any other) file. This little program is available from www.duckware.com/winopen/ HTML Files - I use a professional web editing program because it's my profession. However, there are a wide variety of HTML editors available, including some basic, easy to use ones. A good place to look for such editors is the Tucows software database which you can find at: www.tucows.com |
