HtmlPedigree: How to link images and other multimedia files

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If your GEDCOM file already contains links to images and other files, you can choose to include links to these in the web pages (see How files linked from the GEDCOM are processed). You can also use the program to add directly links to files on your computer or to web pages or other resources on the Internet.

You can do this either when initially creating a set of web pages from a GEDCOM file, or later when updating the web pages. First, use the set of indexes in the left-hand section of the program to find the record you want to add a link to. This could be an individual, a family, a note, a source, a repository or a record of another type. Then right click on the index entry for the record. You should see a dialog box that will allow you to link files to this record.

There are two ways of adding links:

1. Use the "Browse" button to find files on the hard disc of your computer. Navigate to the folder containing the files, and then select the files you want. You can select more than one file from the same folder by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on additional files. When you have selected all the files want from the folder, click "OK". For each file, the program will try to assign a file type (image, video, audio and so on) and a default caption based on the file name. You can edit these by clicking on the name of the file in the left-hand column and using the drop-down menu for file type and the box at the bottom for the caption.
2. To add links to other resources such as web pages, you can click the "Add" button, then edit the file name, file type and caption at the bottom. You should include the full address for Internet resources - for example, http://www.bigsite.com/history.html.

When you have finished selecting the files for this record, and editing their details, click "OK".

The links will appear in the text web pages as a sequence of blue icons immediately underneath the heading for the record. Each icon indicates the type of file that the link leads to, and the chosen caption will be displayed when the visitor hovers the cursor over the icon.

By default, when the visitor clicks on an icon, the file will be displayed in a new browser window. (If the visitor's computer doesn't have a program capable of displaying the file type, they will normally have the option of saving the file to their computer.) Users who can write JavaScript can also customise the response to a click on the icon

The program copies linked files on your hard disc into a subfolder of the folder to which the web pages are saved, called mm (short for "multimedia"). When you upload the web pages to your website, this folder and its contents must be uploaded together with the web pages.

As far as possible, these links will be automatically maintained by the program when the pages are updated. During the updating process, links can be added, deleted and edited in the same way. When new links are added, the files will be copied into the mm subfolder and will have their "Modified" time updated. So when uploading the new web pages to your website, the only linked files in the mm folder that need to be uploaded are those marked as freshly modified (the same as for the web pages in the main folder).