Family Tree

whoopn · August 22, 2021, 10:49pm

Has a family tree been suggested?

There are a lot of old timey photos in my library and I have details on some on who they are and who their children were, and on down. If this was something PS could eventually do I think it would be a really special feature that not even Google has and it adds a dimension to perusing through photos that I think would probably cause folks working from home to get less work done.

Perhaps how it could work:
Faces are found via ML, you name the faces, you assign a face as a child or parent of some other face and PS takes care of the hierarchy. So for example if you already had Great Grandma Patty and you have a photo of Great Great Grandma Victoria, you could mark a face of Great Great Grandma Victoria as the mother of Great Grandma Patty and it would adjust the hierarchy appropriately.

Eventually, since PS is so good with metadata, it would be cool to have the ability to put certain facts or information about a family member in so you could explore and share your own information about your parents and your kids could see what life was like. This all ties to having a family tree (trees) that can detail out and link to faces that the ML engine is finding.

bdillahu · August 23, 2021, 12:29am

I like this… of course it might be better to have some integration with other family tree dedicated software (I host a family site using Webtrees that uses a standard genealogy data format.

whoopn · August 23, 2021, 12:38am

I do like the idea of standard formats, I think the question there might be if its best to do an ingest and align type integration and an export to one of many standard type formats.

bdillahu · August 23, 2021, 12:50am

Yep, lots of ways to solve it I expect… I do really like the idea of integrating pictures with the family tree world - like you, it sounds like, I have a ton of old, scanned pictures (and more to come, my wife is sorting family negatives as I type :-)).

mrm · August 23, 2021, 1:02am

The tree idea is interesting: a minimal integration could be supporting a “description” for each tag that supported hyperlinks, so you could link a user tag with the corresponding page in your geneology software, perhaps?

If you have keywords or person tags, know that PhotoStructure has robust name parsing, supporting lifespan references, maiden names, and more. Check out the tagName* settings…

github.com

photostructure/photostructure-for-servers/blob/1f6d907769fd2b01900eb88ce64bf0d732998aa0/defaults.env#L2767

    
      
          # +-----------+
          # |  tagLens  |
          # +-----------+
          #
          # Should assets be tagged with lens' make and model?
          #
          # PS_TAG_LENS="true"
          
          

          
# +-------------------------------+
          # |  tagNamesCapitalizedAsFamily  |
          # +-------------------------------+
          #
          # Assume uppercased names are family names (this is common practice in
          # geneology).
          #
          # PS_TAG_NAMES_CAPITALIZED_AS_FAMILY="true"
          
          

          
# +-------------------------+
          # |  tagNamesDefaultFamily  |

whoopn · August 23, 2021, 1:58am

I like the linking to an external site, perhaps if that link could carry with it a variable name of the user? For me a picture family tree is the first goal, and the second goal would be additional meta data like (what did they do for a living, where did they live, their obituary or a blurb on their life.

Example of a visual family tree:

Except without the “ME” part…just whatever the youngest generation is. Also it just hit me that trees would want to stick to more cloud-type trees

Not that cartoony of course, whatever looks nice in the PS gui (its a solid gui). The idea though would be see the faces in their genealogy and clicking on a face goes to their smart filter. And hovering or maybe clicking on a little (i) icon gives you their lifespace and other simple meta data?

nuk · April 10, 2023, 4:51am

Four of the main family tree sites appear to be Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, Findmypast and MyHeritage. I also found WikiTree and Geni which appear to be more open but also smaller databases/fewer users.

Ancestry . com does NOT have a public API, and is not free for users.

FamilySearch [does have an API] (https://www.familysearch.org/developers/docs/api/resources), is also the only free one for users, and apparently has the most global data according to this comparison. According to this, “Currently, a GEDCOM file cannot be exported directly from FamilySearch Family Tree. However, you can use partner programs of FamilySearch to get the data from FamilySearch Family Tree, and then create a GEDCOM file in those programs. Here is a list of the programs that are compatible with GEDCOM and FamilySearch.” For example the free RootsMagic does it, along with Legacy Family Tree and Ancestral Quest.

Findmypast does have an API, but is not free for users.

MyHeritage does have an API, but is not free for users.

WikiTree does have an API and is free.

Geni does have an API and is free. Note it’s run my MyHeritage, not entirely sure what the relationship is.

I suppose you could add support for all three in some way. For example if a photo has a hierarchical tag with an ID from FamilySearch in the format XXXX-XXX, you could link directly to that person’s webpage. Presumably something similar exists for the other sites. As for dynamically generating a family tree; I think you’d either have to use an API for one or more of those sites, and/or support a GEDCOM import. I’m not sure how valuable visualization would be, when other sites already do it using the API like https://onepagegenealogy.org and https://familytreechart.com.

I am curious how it would be best to tag a person using hierarchical tags. I think it’s not really possible honestly. There are too many people with the same name, and how do you handle multiple name changes, and so on. So ideally we could do a search for photos with person with eg FamilySearch ID XXXX-XXX, and then do +siblings or +/-2 generations or similar.

Lastly, I found FamilySearch can already create a photographic family tree, see directions at https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/saving-and-printing-a-portrait-pedigree

whoopn · April 10, 2023, 2:08pm

I’m fairly sure something could be configured that works but my request was mainly that we could create the family tree ourselves. So what you’re suggesting I think is more the v2.0 of the feature

nuk · April 10, 2023, 2:33pm

Family trees have lots of complex relationships, and being able to create/edit those should be a feature only in the far distant future if Matt really has nothing better to do. Matt could easily make a super-simple tree editor that ignores complexity. But then it wouldn’t be compatible with the GEDCOM standard and other software, which imo would a huge disadvantage and Matt’s simple editor would be a waste of effort.

Imo PhotoStructure should only support viewing relationships defined by other software. Probably just support importing a GEDCOM at first with abilities to visualize and search those relationships, and some ability to quickly jump to the person’s info in their preferred external website/software.

Ability to automatically read and update genealogy info from a website API could be a distant second step.

Ability to edit genealogy info could be an even more distant third step.