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Stories and Photos

Ways to tell your family's story: generated life stories, a family blog, and photos you can compare and tag.

Life stories

For any person or family, the app puts together a narrative slideshow of their lives: their events, the places they happened, and any related photos, with a short written description for each moment. These are editable, not fixed.

Options when generating a story

Generating a story offers a couple of options first:

• For a person: whether to pull in their families too (spouse, children, parents, siblings), not just their own events.
• For a family: which members' own births and deaths to include.

Downloading a story

Download, next to Present on a story, saves it as a single .story.zip file: every slide's text, dates and places, its photos, and any map shapes and historical map overlays. The file needs nothing else to open: no Gramps Connect, no server, no account. It's a snapshot, so later edits to your tree don't change a story you've already downloaded.

Photos are resized for viewing on screen and saved in a compact format. Their hidden metadata, such as camera details and GPS location, is removed. Your originals in the tree aren't touched.

The format is open and documented, so other programs can make and show stories too. The specification and examples are in the gramps-connect-stories project.

Privacy options when downloading

A downloaded file leaves your tree's access controls behind, so the Download dialog asks what to include:

• Include data marked private (off by default). Off leaves out slides about private events or people, private photos and map overlays, and the place of any slide whose place is private. Only shown if you can see private records; if you can't, they were never sent to you.
• Include living people (off by default). Off leaves out slides about anyone who may still be living, and any photo they appear in, using the same rule as Gramps' own exports.
• Include record IDs (off by default). Adds the Gramps IDs of the story's events and photos, so someone with access to your tree can find the records again.

As you change the switches, the dialog shows how many slides and photos will be included and what's being left out. Text written into a slide is never changed, so check it doesn't mention anyone you're leaving out. A story that's itself about a living or private person can't be downloaded until you turn the matching switch on.

A family blog

Write your own posts, with a title, author, free-text body and photos.

The Blog view in the sidebar lists every post as a browsable, magazine-style feed. Click View to see one full-screen. The newest post also shows up on Home.

Under the hood, a post is an ordinary Source tagged "Blog" with its body as an attached Note, so it's searchable and editable like any other record.

Photo comparisons

Place two photos on top of each other. This is useful for "then and now" pairs, or comparing photos of the same person at different ages.

Tagging photos

Draw a region on a photo to mark who or what's in that part of it. Open the photo full-screen and click a tagged face or object to jump straight to that person's or record's page.