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Export Gedcom File Dialog
Export Gedcom File Dialog
The Export Gedcom File dialog gives you considerable control over
exactly what gets exported into a GEDCOM
file. For most purposes, it should be all you need. But if you want even
more fine-grained control than it allows, you should do an initial
export using this dialog, then open the exported GEDCOM file within
Family Historian (click on
on the menu - under ) and use Family Historian to delete any extra
details that you do not wish to be there. This works because
Family Historian uses GEDCOM as its own 'native' file format. The Split
Tree Helper Tool is designed to help with deletions in
this kind of situation.
Strict Gedcom Conformance
The latest version of GEDCOM, since November 2019, and the version used by Family Historian, is 5.5.1. Family Historian is 100% GEDCOM 5.5.1 compatible and complete in that it supports all standard 5.5.1 records and fields, and all values for those fields, for both import and export. A few options in the Export dialog allow you to create GEDCOM files which may not conform strictly to the GEDCOM 5.5.1 standard in particular ways. The reason these options are allowed is because they are useful and, perhaps surprisingly, may result in GEDCOM files which are more compatible with other genealogy programs than they would be if they were strictly conformant. For example, ANSI is not an approved standard format for GEDCOM files. But ANSI is still a widely-used format for GEDCOM files - at least in a Windows environment.
If despite this, and for whatever reason, it is important to you that your exported GEDCOM file does strictly conform to the GEDCOM 5.5.1 standard, you should choose 'Strict Gedcom' as the value for 'Destination' and use either 'Include in Strict Gedcom Format' or 'Exclude' for Same Sex Relationships. You should use 'UTF-8', 'Unicode', 'ANSEL' or 'ASCII' for File Format, and you should use any option other than 'Embed Media in Export File' for Media Records (embedding was permitted until 5.5 but dropped in 5.5.1). You may also wish to exclude Place records, Research Note records, and Source Template records, although you do not have to. This is because Place records, Research Note records and Source Template records are created using 'application extensions' to GEDCOM. Application extensions are valid GEDCOM, but unless other applications use the same application extensions, they may be ignored, or even treated as errors, by other programs that do not recognise them. Any destination which requires strict GEDCOM is unlikely to support Family Historian Place records, Research Note records and Source Template records. Consequently, by default, if you choose 'Strict Gedcom' as your destination, these records will be marked for exclusion.
See below for more details about these various options.
Fields
| Destination |
In general you are recommended to use 'Default' as your chosen location. If you are planning to give the exported GEDCOM file to someone who has Family Historian 6, or any earlier version of Family Historian, choose "Family Historian 6 or earlier". If you do not do so, faces will not display correctly when the GEDCOM file is opened or imported into a project, using the earlier version of Family Historian. If you are planning to import the exported GEDCOM file into Family Tree Maker, you can also choose 'Family Tree Maker'. If you wish the exported GEDCOM file to conform strictly to the GEDCOM specification, choose 'Strict Gedcom'. The 'Standard Gedcom' option will generate a Gedcom file that conforms very tightly to the Gedcom specification, but less rigorously than 'Strict Gedcom'. Although strict GEDCOM conformance may seem desirable, it is rarely what you really want in practice. In fact, both 'Strict Gedcom' and 'Standard Gedcom' will result in Gedcom files that are less compatible with most other genealogy programs than either 'Default' or 'Family Tree Maker'. For this reason, you are recommended to not use either 'Strict Gedcom' or 'Standard Gedcom' unless you have already tried the other options and they did not give satisfactory results. See 'Strict Gedcom Conformance' above. If you choose 'Family Tree Maker' as Destination, you will be warned when you click OK, if your chosen option for Same Sex Relationships is either 'Include in Symmetric Format' or 'Include in Strict Gedcom Format' as neither of these will be recognised by any version of Family Tree Maker. If you choose 'Strict Gedcom' as Destination, you will be warned when you click OK, if your chosen options do not conform strictly to the GEDCOM spec. Note: If you set the Destination to "Family Historian 6 or earlier", the GEDCOM file will be saved with special Family Historian version number 6.5, the meaning of which is effectively "exported by version 7 or later, for version 6 or earlier". In fact there never was a version 6.5 of Family Historian. |
|---|---|
| File Format |
Choose your preferred file format for the exported file. For a full list of descriptions of file formats, see Export Format Dialog. |
| Add All | Add all Individual records to the list of Individual records to
be included in the export. |
| Select | Opens a selection dialog, to allow selection of the Individual
records to be included in the export. |
| Records to Exclude | Choose record types you wish to exclude from the export. If you tick the option to exclude 'Place records', all place records will be excluded from the export. Excluding place records does not mean that no place information is exported. It means that any information stored about places within Place records (that is, media, notes, latitude and longitude) are not exported. If you tick the option to exclude "One-member Family records", Family records which would be left with only one member (given the list of Individuals selected for export) will be excluded. Family records which would be left with no members are always excluded in any case. If you tick the option to exclude "Unconnected records", all records which, after the export, would not be linked, directly or indirectly, to any of the list of Individuals selected for export, will be excluded. |
| Facts & Notes | Facts (that is, events and attributes) can be flagged as
'Private', 'Tentative' or 'Rejected', in the Fact tab of the
Property Box. By default, any facts flagged in this way are
excluded from an export. If you wish them to be included in
the export, untick the appropriate box. Notes can appear in many contexts within Family Historian. Even if you have excluded Note records, there may be numerous notes within other records. In Family Historian you can mark notes, within a Notes field, as private, by enclosing the text within doubled square brackets. If the option 'Exclude [[private]] notes' is ticked, any notes marked in this way will be excluded from the export. To learn more see Private Notes. In Family Historian notes, you can use numerous word-processing features, such as italics, bold, strikethrough, font type, font size, font colour, bullets, tables, links, note citations, web links, paragraph formatting, indentation and more. Supporting these features requires embedding special formatting codes in notes. These formatting codes are not part of the GEDCOM spec, and other genealogy applications are unlikely to support all of them and may support none of them. For this reason, if you are exporting to an application other than Family Historian, you are normally recommended to remove all special word-processing features by ticking the option to "Convert notes to plain text". |
| Media Records |
There are 4 possible values. These are:
See the note Exporting Media below for more information about these options. |
| Source Records |
There are 4 possible values. These are:
If you take the first option, 'Include', Source records will be
included in the usual way, with no special processing. If
you take the fourth option, 'Exclude', Source records will be
excluded. The second and third options mention template fields.
These are the special fields that are used (and only used) to
implement sources and citations based on source
templates. There is no support for source templates
built into GEDCOM. Family Historian uses valid application
extensions to store all source template details, but other
applications may not recognise them. For this reason, it
is sometimes desirable to copy template field labels and values
into standard GEDCOM notes, to ensure that the fields and their
values, will be available in other applications. If you
choose 'Include and Copy Template Field to First Note', all
template field labels and values in Source records will be
copied to the end of the first note attached to the Source
record, and all template field labels and values in citations
will be copied to the end of the first note attached to the
citation. If the Source record or citation has no note, a
new one will be created in each case, as needed. The option 'Include and Copy Template Fields to New Note' is similar, except that the template field details are always copied into their own, separate note. If your project does not contain any sources and citations based on source templates, the second and third options behave exactly like the first option, which is to say that Source records will simply be included, with no special processing. |
| Same Sex Relationships |
This option will have no effect if the Individuals you have selected for export do not include any two people who have a recorded same sex relationship. There are 4 possible values. These are:
If in doubt use unless you wish to exclude same sex relationships, in which case choose . For more information about all four options, see Exporting Same Sex Relationship Information. Tip: If you wish to check whether your current
file or project includes any same sex relationships, close the
Export Gedcom File dialog box and run the 'Same Sex
Relationships' query. To do this, click on the
menu, and then ,
and then .
If the 'Result Set' window is blank, your current file or
project does not contain any same sex relationships. |
| Override Copyright Text and File Description in Exported File Header |
Each Gedcom file contains a special record called a 'Header' which may optionally contain, amongst other things, a copyright message and a file description. Take this option if you wish to override the copyright message and file description that is used in the current Gedcom file. Tip: To view and edit the copyright message and file description for the current Gedcom file, close this dialog box, then click on the View menu, and then Special Records, and then Header record. |
Exporting Media
If you wish to export media with your GEDCOM file, the simplest option might appear to be to use 'Embed Media in Export File' (see the Media Records field). In this case, all media will be automatically embedded in the exported file. The disadvantage of this option is that depending on how much media, you have, the GEDCOM might end up being very large. Also, the latest version of the GEDCOM standard (5.5.1) no longer supports this feature. It was supported until 5.5 and Family Historian still permits it for this reason. Some genealogy applications that support GEDCOM 5.5, might be able to load embedded media. But in practice this is unlikely. Even genealogy applications that support 5.5, rarely support this particular feature. So what are the alternatives?
If you use the 'Use Existing File Paths for External File Links' option, the likelihood is that when you next view your GEDCOM file, some or all of the media (e.g. pictures) may have disappeared. The reason for that is this: Family Historian allows you to store links to external media files on your hard disk. If the media files are kept in your project folder (which is recommended), Family Historian will store the links as relative file links - meaning that it stores the location of the media files relative to the GEDCOM file itself. The big advantage of this is that if you copy or move an entire project folder from one place to another (or from one computer to another even), the links will all still work correctly, regardless of where the project folder is put. However, for the same reason, if you simply create a copy of your GEDCOM file, without also copying the media files that it has links to, to their equivalent location relative to the copied file, these links will no longer work when you open the copied file. To give an example: if an exported GEDCOM file contains a link to a picture file "Mary.jpg" located in a subfolder called 'Media', this picture will not be found unless there really is a subfolder called 'Media' in the same folder as the GEDCOM file, which has a picture file called 'Mary.jpg' in it. Consequently, if you want your media to appear, you would need to copy the media to the equivalent location relative to your exported GEDCOM file. Depending on how your media is stored in your project folder, this might just mean creating a subfolder called 'Media' in the same location as the exported file, and copying media files from your project folder into that.
Instead of using 'Use Existing File Paths for External File Links' you may prefer to use 'Use Full File Paths for External File Links'. The effect of this option is that Family Historian will convert all relative file links to absolute file links in the exported file. If you open a GEDCOM file, after using this option, you should find that all the media still appear correctly. This is because the GEDCOM file now contains links which reference the location of the media files on your PC, and are not relative to the location of the exported file. However, if you send this GEDCOM file, on its own, to someone else on another computer, they will still not be able to see the media because those files aren't on their computer. Of course you could send them the media files separately, but unless they placed these media files on their computer, exactly where Family Historian expected them to be (which would be hard to arrange), they still would not be found.
Yet another option - which will only work if your data is kept in a project and you allow Family Historian to store media in the project folder - is not to export a GEDCOM file at all, but instead to simply give the person a copy of your entire project folder (if you prefer, you could make a copy of the project folder first and then delete extraneous information using the Split Tree Helper tool - accessible from the File menu). Of course if your recipient uses Family Historian, they will be able to open the project and see the media. But even if they use another genealogy program, they can still open the GEDCOM file within the project folder, and depending on the capabilities of their genealogy application, they may be able to load and view the media files in the project folder too. This works because Family Historian stores record data in GEDCOM files, even within its own project folders.
To learn more about how Family Historian stores media, run the Work with External File Links tool (available on the Tools menu), and click its button to understand the information it is giving you, and what you can do with it.