Data, by it's nature is somewhat dry, but by adding a photograph or a copy of a document to the individual's file you can bring that person to life.
Family photographs personalise an individual's file and make them more tangible. Photographs of your ancestors and birth, marriage and death certificates etc put 'flesh on an otherwise bare bone'.
Legacy allows you to attach a range of digital images and files to an individual:
Photographs - in digital format
Videos - in digital format
Sound - in a range of common audio formats (MP3, Wav)
Word Process Documents - Microsoft word documents, PDF documents, text files etc.
Naming your Digital Images (Photographs) & Other Files
Giving files a descriptive name is an easy way of differentiating the many photos/files that you will eventually accumulate. This image was given a name of 'IMG10' by the digital camera that took the photograph.
The name 'IMG10' gives no clue as to the photograph's subject matter. The photograph was emailed to me by a distant relative - it's a photo of my American cousin Emma Sophia Manning.
I renamed the photograph; Emma Sophia Manning_courtesy of LaMar W Skeen. The latter part of the file name is an acknowledgement of where the photograph came from. You will receive images from many different sources and I believe is you should pay the giver the courtesy of acknowledging their generosity in sharing the item with you.
Where to Store you Images/Files
How you store these files on your computer may not seem important when you start your family tree - you probably have only a few photographs at the beginning. Easy to find a photograph of Uncle Ted when you only have a few, but what how hard would it be to find his photograph if you had 16,000 images (I have that many).
Where you store your images on your computer is a personal decision, but Legacy has a specific folder called 'Pictures' where you can easily store all your images.
The file path would look something like this:
C: \Legacy\Pictures
You could dump all your pictures into the 'Picture' Folder and they would be automatically sorted into strict alphabetical order by your computer's operating system. Great if you only have a few but horrible if you have a lot - even worse if the file name of the picture does not identify the subject (see Naming your Digital Images (Photographs) & Other Files above).
I recommend that you store images, documents etc. in a folder created specifically for each individual.
To do this you need to create a folder in the name of the individual concerned. If you decide to store your photographs in the Legacy Pictures folder you will have to create a sub-folder in the Legacy Pictures folder.
Using the photograph of Emma Sophia Manning shown above the file path would look like this:
C:\Legacy\Pictures\Manning, Emma Sophia 1874
Using the family name first will ensure that when Microsoft Windows lists all your folders all the individuals with the same family name will be together (in alphabetic order). Type the family name first (using a capital to commence the name, add a comma to separate the given name(s) and add the individual's year of birth at the end.
(Note that I have added a date at the end of Emma's name - it's Emma's birth year. During the course of building your family tree you will undoubtedly come across one or more individuals with the same name - particularly sons named after their father. Adding the individual's birth year after their name clearly identifies the correct individual.
This is what the file/directory structure would look like:
