Patience Required for Ancestry's New Media Item Categories

Ancestry rolled out some much needed new categories for user uploaded media items! (This includes media items saved from FindAGrave, Newspapers and Fold3, since those have always counted as user uploaded media). I was really excited when I noticed this yesterday evening. Being OCD, there was no time to waste and I set off to "fix" all the categories in my media gallery when I got home from work. Keeping in mind, my tree isn't huge by any standard (1571 media items) and here I am over 4 hours later and I'm just finishing up (...big sigh...). Making all the changes was far from painless.

Headstones and Sites/Buildings/Place were no problem. They really didn't need any changes (except a quick scroll through to look for anything I might have accidentally mis-categorized along the way). So far so good!

Then I tried filtering to Portraits/Family Photos and Documents/Certificates (at the same time) and tried selecting multiple items for edit. Well, there's apparently a limit to about 10 or so (I didn't actually count) you can select at one time. Ummmm....wait...you can't mass update them all to the same category at one time?! You have to change them one by one? And then go back to the media gallery when you hit the last one, re-filter and select 10 more? Not efficient at all. But I do like having obituary, newspaper article, yearbook and several other new categories to choose from.

OK...how can we better tackle this? Let's just use the right arrow start at the beginning and scroll thru them one by one. I mean, a lot of them are pictures anyway and won't need changes.... Oh wait! When you go back to the gallery to see your magnificent progress...new images crop up in between ones you know you already went past. I was beyond frustrated. I even sorted them alphabetically and went thru them again. Guess what? More cropped up when I went back to the gallery after making my way to the end. After a few more times of doing this, I devised a new plan.

I limited to just Portraits/Family Photos and painfully made my way through. After a 2nd and then a 3rd scroll down the page to make sure nothing else had magically appeared out of the genie's bottle, I limited to Documents/Certificates and started working through them. Ugggg....I had 3 newspaper items I changed probably 10 times each and while each time it gave me the gratifying little pop up showing my changes were saved, when I refreshed, they wouldn't retain the changes. And it wasn't like I maxed out on changes or anything. I could change other media items, just not those specific 3. I tried closing my browser. I tried another browser. I tried doing other changes and going back to them. No joy. Finally, in desperation I picked up my phone and edited them in the app (What's that you say? I've never posted about the mobile app? That's because I can't stand it! I'll only use it when my back is to the wall). That worked and now they're fixed when I log in via my browser. (That one tip may be the biggest thing you take away from this post, other than my growing sense of frustration).

And while photos have all those wonderful new categories, sadly, Stories have exactly....well...none. Never mind a lot of obits and newspaper stories are transcribed as Stories. Now WHY would users want to actually save like items together for easy retrieval? That would be too logical right? I can only hope they'll add a field for this in the future, but for the moment, Stories still remain lumped together regardless of what they may contain.

Oh, and one more thing! While you can filter many ways, including by person and/or place, you cannot search for a word in the title or description of a media item. To do that, you have to scroll endlessly until all the media are loaded for the category(s) you select, and then do a standard old Ctrl+F and hope for the best (and that's searching only the titles...no way to search inside the description or transcription). You can tag media now (which could eliminate some of the limited filtering) but there's no way I'm even going to consider going down the rabbit hole! I already use a custom tag on the person profile when interesting photos and/or stories exist. That's going to have to be enough. Even my OCD doesn't want to think about attempting tagging media after the immense fun I had with categories.

In conclusion, and because I have no mental energy left after painstakingly (and painfully) making my way through my media items, make sure you have time to dedicate to the task if you decide to take this on. I'm grateful Ancestry is expanding options for users. It's wonderful (truly it is) but I wish they'd make it a little less frustrating to use. After all, I've no doubt they'll use these categories (and tagging for those who choose to use it) for some purpose of their own at some point...all I wish is they'd make it a little less painful to use the new features they're rolling out. Maybe they should slow the roll and assess how all these changes are affecting site performance...

And now...I'm jumping down off my little soap box, tucking it under my arm and scurrying away to do something mindless like watch TV. There's no research for me tonight, categories took all the time and mental energy I had this evening.