1: File size - and 2: Placeholders

If you are having difficulty using iFamily for Leopard.
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favell44
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1: File size - and 2: Placeholders

Post by favell44 » Sun May 03, 2009 1:45 pm

I have transferred iFamily (v2.505) from my iBook (Tiger) to my new iMac (Leopard).

1: I noticed the speed increase straight away and then I did as suggested and exported the database to Gedcom and imported it back to iFamily. Now it is blindingly fast, but the file size (for almost 5000 people) has shrunk from 92.8 MB to 14.4 MB. As far as I can tell everything is still there, and I&#39m not complaining, but am I missing something? Please reassure me if you are out there and have noticed the same thing.

2: The only adverse effect I have noticed so far is that all my painstakingly entered placeholders have disappeared. Do I face the onerous task of putting them back one by one?
Money can&#39t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
Spike Milligan

Tom
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Re: 1: File size - and 2: Placeholders

Post by Tom » Sun May 03, 2009 4:13 pm

I believe Keith pointed out when Leopard was released that the new OS had improved database functionality through Apple&#39s implementation of SQLite and that iFamily would take advantage of that functionality if one followed the procedure that you described. The increased speed and the reduction of database size are attributable to improvements in Leopard over Tiger. I can&#39t speak to the disappearance of placeholders. If all of your pictures are intact, I would assume the same would apply to placeholders.
Tom

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Warwick Wilson
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Post by Warwick Wilson » Sun May 03, 2009 4:38 pm

The improvements of Leopard over Tiger will account for some of the size reduction. You may also find that the size of the database will slowly increase as you browse if you did not prebuild the thumbnail images while importing the Gedcom.

Placeholders are currently stored in the iFamily database as picture records with empty pointers. When the Gedcom export routines are exporting the multimedia content they ignore these nulls and do not print the records. As such the placeholders are lost. I will see if I can create some custom tags for iFamily to recreate the empty records upon import.

favell44
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2008 7:23 am
Location: Australia

Post by favell44 » Mon May 04, 2009 6:58 am

Thank you both for your helpful replies.
The size of the file is indeed increasing steadily as I use it which is consistent with an increase in the number of thumbnails.
And Warwick, if you can find a way to retain placeholders it would be very nice.
Money can&#39t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
Spike Milligan

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