The Photo Hint I Wish I'd Never Saved

Ah yes...the bell icon notifications on Ancestry. 

We have NO way to turn them off. NO option to filter the type of notifications we receive. And most annoyingly, it seems  some hints simply repeat over and over again...ad nauseum.

I dismiss 99.9% of these notifications outright without even reading them. About the only ones I find interesting (or useful) tell me how many people I added and how many records I worked with the previous week. Otherwise, they're almost a complete a waste of time for me. However, the very few I do want to see would be buried if I didn't regularly clear all the others. So, I dismiss over and over...and over again. 

But the worst is a photo hint I saved a couple months ago from someone else's tree. I get notification after notification there may be a new photo in hint in their tree. I dismiss the notification several times a day, only to have it keep coming back. I mark it read before I dismiss it....and you guessed it...it comes back. I've clicked and gone to the tree, but no joy. I've probably dismissed the same notification (shown above), 300+ times in the last two months (and I'm not exaggerating.... upwards of 5 times times per research session the same exact notification pops up, day after day after day.) I truly wish I'd never saved any photos from the specific tree in question. It's not even a tree I'm a guest or contributor to - it's just a random public tree I saved a photo from. It's almost like this one notification is stuck in the queue. I've saved many other photos and they don't haunt me like this one does.

Please Ancestry - give us an option to disable or at least filter these notifications. Or even an option to permanently delete or mute specific ones would help. Make it a ProTools feature. I'd pay for ProTools forever if it meant I could get rid of these notifications (or at least stop this one notification from haunting me day and night!)

In general, I love Ancestry. I really do! But this feature is not a help for me and it's not a time saver. Quite the opposite. I fully acknowledge, maybe it's just me and how I work. Maybe others DO find these notifications helpful. I wish I could just ignore them completely. Unfortunately, it's not how my brain works. I need a tidy screen. I have the same challenge on my cell phone. I can't stand badge counts and have to clear them straight away. It's most definitely an OCD thing....but it's a real thing, even if it's not something everyone understands. You never know, with the ability to customize these notifications, I might even embrace them.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe other users truly do find the feature useful. Or maybe, many just ignore the icon completely. I just wish Ancestry would give us options . And now, with my frustrations vented, I shall jump down off my little soapbox, tuck it under my arm and scurry back to my research....right after I dismiss he same photo hint yet again...