Everyone knows that I love photographs of our ancestors. Seeing the
family resemblance in a photograph taken a hundred years ago sends
chills up my back. Once, in wondering if a branch of the family was
really mine, I stumbled across a photo of a civil war soldier and
there, as if looking me straight in the eye, was the spitting image
of my kid brother Shane. Wow. I had no doubt, we had to be related.
Recently, however, they’ve been testing my patience. The photos, not
the ancestors.
During the last couple of times I have tried exporting the Heycuz
database into web pages, one of the photographs has caused my system
to crash. Each time I attempted to export the files, it would go for
15 hours and 23 minutes and right at that point, bam, everything
would fail. I’d have to rebuild the file, another couple of hours and
try again.
I use Reunion, a Macintosh computer application for genealogy.
Normally, I can’t say enough about this software. I’ve used a lot of
the different programs but Reunion stands so high above the others
that its no question that this is the program of choice. I do keep a
copy of Family Tree Maker installed on my son’s PC, but I’ve used it
maybe twice this year and only to convert submitted FTM files into
gedcoms and opening them up in Reunion.
So, I posted my problem on the Reunion Talk board hoping someone had
similar problems and solved it, but I didn’t get one reply. Come on!
You’re telling me I’m the only lucky one to have such a problem? So,
I tried again and noticed that it crashed right about the point that
it started to export the photographs. It must be a rogue photograph
then, I assumed. So, I tried to export only the people that had
photographs to test the theory. That was only about 6,000 files,
compared to the 90,000+ people on heycuz. Halfway through the 15
hours it still took to export the file–Why so long?–I realized that
if it crashed it still wouldn’t solve the problem. Even so, I waited,
and sure enough it got to the “exporting images” sequence and
crashed. After rebuilding the file for the umpteenth time, I decided
to export only a few files with photographs and see if that would
help. This time the export went much faster, exporting 300 people,
but it still crashed. So, I tried turning off all photos and it worked.
So, I knew it was a photo. Then, I went back and exported only 50
people with photos. Drum roll, please….Tada! It exported with no
problems. So, I tried 100. It went. I tried 200, it didn’t go. I
theorized that it must be one photo and if I could just narrow it
down to that one photo I could take it out or fix it and then solve
the problem. So, I went through the entire database and exported
every one, 100 people at a time. It took a week. However, it still
didn’t solve the problem. If I exported the files in 100 increments,
it would work every time. Unfortunately, if you do export the family
file in 100s, the links no longer work and the result is a useless
bunch of html pages. The good news is the photo files do export. So,
what I ended up doing, eager to get the updates uploaded, is exported
all the files as though there were no problem. Of course, when it
came to the exporting images it crashed, but then I just merged all
the photo files from my 100-people experiment into their correct
folders and checked to make sure that the correct photos linked to
the right people. I believe it worked. I know its a temporary fix,
but at least I got the updates done.
After spending a week uploading all the files of course, I’m still
left to resolve the problem. Anyone with a bit of computer knowledge,
is probably thinking that the problem has an obvious cause. Memory.
Well, I have twice the amount the software requirements call for. I
have a processor that is three times the minimum speed recommended.
The photographs are all small jpgs. Well, I did notice that there
were a couple of .tiff formatted photos so I converted them to jpgs
but that didn’t solve it. Besides, it had always worked before the
last few months. The only thing that changed is of course,
corrections, and there was a software update. Unfortunately, I can’t
back track and use the older version of software because then it will
no longer open my file. Since my system isn’t the most up to date I’m
hoping that if I finally upgrade the Computer system software it will
fix the problem. If not, at least I know that I can export the pages,
100 people at a time, but that means I will be doing updates less
often as it takes such a long time to update. So, if you’re wondering
why your corrections take so long to get up on the web, now you know.
On a semi-related note: Apple recently switched its server to “The
Cloud” and, once again, lucky me, I was one of the 1 percent of
people who lost email service. So any one who tried to write to my
Mac address, which is the address I use for Heycuz members, didn’t
get through. I have other email addresses, so for the first week I
didn’t notice it. Then, someone forwarded a note that my email was
undeliverable and checking with Mac’s website, I found out why. It
would take another week for Mac to get its act together and get mail
service back. I can’t believe they could do that and still run
commercials about how much better everything is.
Anyway, with “The Cloud” and the problems with my software, I will be
down once again, hopefully not for too long, while I do a clean
install of Mac OS Leopard. Wish me luck!