Including photos and Multimedia in GEDCOM

[LyndaCook]

Is there currently a way of including the photos and multimedia in GEDCOMs? Would like to create a file that contains all the graphic data I have compiled.

[theKiwi]

Not until Reunion supports GEDCOM 7 - which does allow for packaging all of the media along with the GEDCOM file into a single "package".

Roger

[KirkS]

Roger, am I correct that even in GEDCOM 7, the actual GEDCOM file itself will still be text-only?
But it will contain links to media, which are in included in the package?

[theKiwi]

Roger, am I correct that even in GEDCOM 7, the actual GEDCOM file itself will still be text-only?
But it will contain links to media, which are in included in the package?

Yes - that is correct. And so a software importing a GEDCOM 7 .gdz file will import the genealogy data, and link the media items to where it should be. TNG 14 goes some way to supporting this now, but the only software I have that can create a GEDCOM 7 file is TNG itself, so I've not experimented with it.

GEDCOM 5.5 (I think it was) allowed for including the media items as a "BLOB" (the media items were each MIME encoded and included as text in the GEDCOM file, but that was discontinued in 5.5.1.

Roger

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

The GEDCOM 5.5 Standard allowed two different ways to include multimedia in GEDCOM files. Embedded and linked. The ability to embed the multimedia was dropped in 5.5.1 draft, but the ability to link multimedia to the multimedia files externally has remained. It is up to individual software developers to decide whether to implement it or not in their software.

As per Wikipedia:

"Multimedia


The GEDCOM standard supports the inclusion of multimedia objects (for example, photos of individuals). Such multimedia objects can be either included in the GEDCOM file itself (called the "embedded form") or in an external file where the name of the external file is specified in the GEDCOM file (called the "linked form"). Embedding multimedia directly in the GEDCOM file makes transmission of data easier, in that all of the information (including the multimedia data) is in one file, but the resulting file can be enormous. Linking multimedia keeps the size of the GEDCOM file under control, but then when transmitting the file, the multimedia objects must either be transmitted separately or archived together with the GEDCOM into one larger file. Support for embedding media directly was dropped in the draft 5.5.1 standard."