[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Getting the photos out of Family Tree Maker

[Gary Warner]

To all,

I have had some discussions with the people who make Legacy, and also have 
done a little experimenting.  It appears that Family Tree Maker (FTM) 
embeds the photo into the actual program.  Legacy, on the other hand links 
the photos from a photo file of your choosing.  The problem with the FTM 
method is that means that there is no easy way to get the pictures back out 
(unless there is some method I have not yet discovered).

The easiest way to solve this problem is to use your original photos that 
you still have somewhere else on your hard drive and LINK them into another 
genealogy program like Legacy (you DO have them saved somewhere, right?).

If you want to move to another genealogy program that also embeds the 
pictures (I think this is a mistake, but the choice is yours), you can do 
that by copying the picture into the computer clipboard and then going to 
your new program and import the picture from the clopboard.  To do this, go 
to the Scrapbook in FTM and find someone who has a photo.  Right-click on 
the photo and then select  "Copy Picture/Object."  Now go to your new 
program and use the import process they list for importing from clipboard.

For those of you that plan to switch to Legacy, or any other program that 
links the pictures, instead of embedding them, here is the way I have 
successfully copied photos from FTM.

1.  Open FTM and go to the first person who has a photo or photos.
2.  Click on the Scrapbook feature so that the photos are visible.
3.  Right click on the first photo and select "Copy Picture/Object."
4.  Open Paint (for PC users, it is under START, ALL PROGRAMS, 
ACCESSORIES), or some other software that will allow you to paste from the 
clopboard.  Paste the photo (Control+V, or use the Edit menu and 
paste).  The photo will appear.
5.  Save the photo with a name, and select a format for the photo that 
suits your needs.  The default is bitmap, but it might be easier to save it 
as a jpeg or tiff format.
6.  Do this for each photo on FTM and you will eventually get done.  If you 
have a lot of photos, then the process will be tedious, but doable.
7.  When you have all of your photos out of FTM (or have created a separate 
COPY of your photo file directory, then you can link them into Legacy, or 
any other program that allows linking of photos.  I suggest a COPY of your 
photos to use for linking, because it is possible to delete photos from 
Legacy, and that will also delete them from this special copy folder.  That 
is not something you want to do in the folder that has the ONLY copy of 
your photos.

Gary Warner