General Topics

Drag-and-Drop

Family Historian provides extensive support for drag-and-drop.  Drag-and-drop is a quick and easy way of moving or copying items (usually text or pictures) both within Family Historian itself, and also from other application windows into Family Historian projects.  For example, suppose you want to add a picture into Family Historian.  If you are viewing the picture on your desktop, or within File Explorer (the standard Windows program for displaying files), you can simply click on the picture file and, keeping the mouse button pressed, drag it onto Family Historian's main application window.  When you release the mouse button, a dialog box will appear, prompting you to confirm.  And if you do so, the picture will be added to your current project.  This same method can be used to add not just one picture, but multiple pictures if you want.

You can't always drag-and-drop either pictures or text into Family Historian.  For this to work, it is not enough that Family Historian supports it.  The program that is displaying the pictures or text has to support it too.  But a little experimentation will quickly show whether a program supports it or not.  Many do.  Most web-browsers will support drag-and-drop of text, and sometimes also of pictures, for example - though, to make matters more complicated, whether or not they support this is affected by security settings on your web browser, and also by the way particular websites are configured.  Nevertheless, if it does work, it can often be the quickest and easiest way of moving data into Family Historian, so it's worth checking out.  Bear in mind that if you have enabled automatic source citations, any data added to Family Historian will automatically be given an appropriate source citation.

Drop Targets

As we saw above, the main Family Historian application window is what is known as a drop target - meaning that you can drop things onto it (pictures in this case), and useful things will happen when you do.  However, the application window is not the only drop target within Family Historian.  For example, the Media tab of the Property Box is another drop target, and so is the Media Viewer.  Dropping pictures onto these specific drop targets can be an even better option than simply dropping them onto the application window.  If, for example, you drop pictures onto the Media tab of the Property Box for an Individual, the pictures will not just be added to Family Historian, but they will be added as pictures of that person.  If you open the Media Viewer to display pictures of an event (a Christening say), and then drop a dozen pictures onto the Media Viewer, they will all be added as pictures of the christening.

The table below lists some of the drop targets within Family Historian, and describes what will happen if you drop things onto them.

Family Historian Location	Item that can be dragged-and-dropped	Action
Main application window	Pictures	Pictures will be added to the project (you will be prompted to confirm).  A media record will be created for each picture.
Media Tab of the Property Box	Pictures	Pictures will be added to the project (you will be prompted to confirm).  A media record will be created for each picture.  Each media record will be linked to the record (Individual, Family, Source, Place, ... whatever) being shown in the Property Box.
Media Viewer	Pictures	Pictures will be added to the project (you will be prompted to confirm).  A media record will be created for each picture.  Each media record will be linked to the fact (event or attribute) that the Media Viewer was showing media for.
Text boxes within the Property Box, Note Window, Citation Window, Parents Window, Automatic Source Citation Pane.	Text	The text will be inserted into the text box.  With large text fields, such as the text displayed in the Note Window, the dropped text will be simply inserted.  With small text fields however, the behaviour is a little different.  In most cases, If you drop onto the existing text, the existing text will be replaced.  If you drop into the box, but after the existing text, the new text will be appended to the existing text. Tip: If you don't like the results after dropping the text, click Undo on the Edit menu (if dropping within the Note Window, it has its own Undo button on its toolbar).
Links (e.g. Add Mother or Add Father) in the Parents Window.	Text	A small dialog will appear, with the name details already filled-in, prompting you to confirm that you want to add the mother or father.  When you confirm, a new Individual record will created (with the supplied name), as mother or father, of the person whose parents are being displayed in the Parents Window (that is, the current record in the Property Box).

Tip: During the process of dragging, when you are moving a selected item over Family Historian, and before you have released the mouse button, a thick blue rectangle will appear around any text box, tab, link, or window, that is a drop target.  This is a visual confirmation that the area is a drop target.  This does not apply to the main application window.  No thick blue rectangle will be displayed in that case.

Tip: If you drag text from some word-processors, the word-processor may assume that you are trying to move the text, when in fact you want to copy it.  In that case, if you press-and-hold the Ctrl key while doing the drag-and-drop, this should ensure that the action is interpreted as a copy and not a move.  The appearance of the cursor during the action should also be a guide.

Drag-and-Drop Within Family Historian

The table above gives examples of how you can add text and pictures to Family Historian from elsewhere.  But you can also use drag-and-drop within Family Historian itself.  For example, if you select a number of records in the main body of the Records Window, you can drag-and-drop them into a Named List, if the Named List pane is open.  In that case, the records will simply be added to the named list in question.  If you drag-and-drop the same records into the Note Window, they will be inserted into the text as comma-separated record links.

The WEb Search Window

If you want to drag-and-drop pictures or text from a web page, this is probably more likely to work if you display the web page in the Web Search Window, rather than in an external web browser.  See the Web Search Window for more details.