The current search facility is helpful but does depend on a structured file naming format, without the effort in users can hardly expect to get satisfactory results out. Rootsmagic could incorporate further file type categorization like Cemetery, Photo's, Document, Census, Video etc and allow for some user defined categories to provide filtered results, a simple drop down selection list would display any particular category to help selection.
WISH#1 - Search selection drop down for ANY or ALL to allow selection based on multiple non contiguous components. In other words in the case of all show me results for "John" & "Doe" & "Census"
The above on its own would work well for me as many years ago I adopted a structured file naming convention but some users would probably prefer the categorization option.
I have posted this many times before but I collect media, screen snippets, scans etc much faster than I can practically link them to RM, besides collecting data and linking them to RM are essentially two different tasks IMO. What I previously did was save all new items to a "to-be-linked" folder and then work through them at a later date. This then involved a further discipline where I would link an item at a future date and then remove it from the "to-be-linked" folder to the appropriate folder to much work.
WISH#2 - Provide "Find Unlinked Media" utility under Tools and use the existing Fix Broken Media Links folder selection criteria. This would compare the RM MediaTable to the file contents of the selected folder or path and display the results (files currently unlinked) in a list view in Media Gallery. The user could simply just select each UNLINKED file in turn, click the TAG MEDIA and select person, fact or place to make the media linkage more complete.
I wrote an Excel workbook to do just this for my own benefit and I believe TomH has posted it for download on his own site. It is a very simple task to accomplish and I do really hope this functionality becomes available within RM in the not too distant future.
The bottom line here is that with ever growing media galleries from online sources the management of media becomes an ever increasing task, we are no longer dealing with a dozen of grannies family photo's here
. No user can expect RM to somehow overcome poor folder and file naming disciplines but where these are robust and in place programs like RM need to provide management tools to extract and filter that data and the program that does it best will have an edge.
