Basically GEDCOM defines the creation of a text file, so it cannot include media in a native form. A definition for 'embedded multimedia' was added in version 5.4 (the BLOB tag), remained in GEDCOM 5.5 (see Appendix E of the definition), but was dropped in the 5.5.1 draft. The encode/decode definition was convoluted and ambiguous (like most of GEDCOM) and I have never seen any program actually implement it. Given the confusion over what parts of 5.x various programs actually DO support, I would not guarantee its validity in any case. Thus, if you ignore this 'embedded' function, all that a GEDCOM file can carry is a path statement to where images lie - which will be on the creator's computer and thus largely useless to a GEDCOM recipient unless the sender takes the trouble to package media files together with the GEDCOM file. Don F -----Original Message----- From: TMG [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lee Hoffman/KY Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:21 PM To: The Master Genealogist Rootsweb Email List <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [TMG] Slow GEDCOM Export At 11/18/2017 17:57, John Cardinal wrote >I am not an expert on exporting GEDCOMs from TMG, but my experience is that >they take a long time. To make sure I wasn't misremembering, I just did a >test and exported my 27,000 member project and it took 20 minutes. In my >opinion, that's slow. Backing up my project is much faster, no more than a >minute. I have never noted a GEDCOM export to take more than a few minutes. However, I have never exported a GEDCOM with more than a few thousand persons. I have noted that TMG takes longer to export a GEDCOM as the number of person increased. Also an export of a subset of a data set will also increase the length of time. A recent export of a 5000 person subset took quite a long time (15 - 20 minutes?). Having TMG create a new project of that same subset and then exporting a GEDCOM from the new project took a total of about 8 minutes. >I did include exhibits in the GEDCOM file. I don't think TMG will include >internal image exhibits (I don't have any), but it did include external >image exhibits (GEDCOM 5.5 supports that) and it also exported internal text >exhibits. The external image exhibits should not slow TMG down. It doesn't >copy the image files, it writes the path to the file in the GEDCOM file. Hmm! I vaguely remember discussions about including multimedia files in a GEDCOM and later GEDCOM version specs (not sure of the earlier versions) speak to having the file in the GEDCOM in "encoded multimedia lines". Thus the file would be encoded and fully included in the GEDCOM file. My vague recollection of that time is that such encoding had a lot of problems. Including File Paths would get around that problem assuming that the exported GEDCOM was to be imported on the same computer. Otherwise, I would think there would be a lot of work required to prepare the GEDCOM for import on another computer. Lee The TMG archive is found here: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/index/TMG/ Instructions on how to subscribe to TMG: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/other/Software/TMG.html ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message