Syncing to Ancestry.com or another collaborative platform?

[reggoboy]

This is an open question and I really need your input here.

I have put many years of effort into populating data into Reunion. I have also purchased the latest Reunion 13. But as I'm collaborating with family members around the world, it is no longer sufficient for me to be sending occasional PDFs for their consumption. They want to interact with all the latest data at their convenience and in different views. They want to search and navigate and even contribute content. But the HTML output still looks like something out of the 90s.

Basically, they want some type of online, collaborative piece of software. Perhaps like Ancestry.com, which is the only one I have spent any time with recently, but without all the red-tape and restrictions. And price. Some of them also have extensive trees already in Ancestry.com that have critical data. As awesome as Reunion is, the model if keeping all the data for an extensive family cooped up in a single-user, non-collaborative database is way too outdated, and defeats the value of me having collected all this data, if I can't let others freely enjoy it.

But correct me if I'm wrong, there is no way to do a bi-directional sync between Ancestry.com <--> Reunion, right? And there is no way to export/import photos and other media? (No, fixing one photos at a time by hand is not an acceptable option).

So!

My question to you is, is there another platform out there to which I can sync my Reunion content, including photos, and which will allow relatives to browse in a modern, tree-like format? It would be nice if they could also contribute content, splice into larger trees, and sync back to Reunion, but those latter 3 criteria are things I could probably live without.

[jmo]

Check out <tngsitebuilding.com>, among others. I think no software is as flexible and easy to use for entering data as Reunion, but TNG and some other products like that do help with collaborative research.

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

I agree that TNG is worth a look if you have the technical ability to run it. For an example, see https://www.genealogics.org

[janelucas]

Hi, I’m a bit late to this post, so hope you will see it. You may by now have already discovered that you can synch Ancestry with Family Tree Maker, software now owned by MacKiev. But it was an Ancestry product, hence the permission for FTM to synch. If you download a GEDCOM from Ancestry direct and import to Reunion, you will not have photos etc., as you know. But if you synch with FTM, then export GEDCOM from there, you can import that to Reunion and it will contain all your photos. It works quite well, though sometimes information is in a different field to where I’d expect. That is because Reunion categories for source and citation detail is different to Ancestry I think.
The problem then is how to keep Reunion up to date without importing a new GEDCOM all the time. I asked that question recently but didn’t get a response. If you import to the existing family file, you will just have duplicates. So I am working on importing to a new family file and then merging new information. I haven’t tried that yet, but in theory it can be done, according to the help files.
it will be more work than a synch but as Ancestry won’t give Reunion permission to synch there isn’t much to be done.
I have the same problem as you with sharing. I send my family a sharing link to Ancestry, and you can give people Editor status, but they don’t like it. I am wondering about setting up a website, but I don’t want private information available in the Cloud.
I believe that you can share FTM if the person you are sharing with has the same software. But I haven’t tried it either as my family aren’t too keen on the cost of buying the software. A new version costs about £80 (sterling) and updates are usually free, except for major ones.
Hope that helps
Jane