Gedcom Importing

Steve,
Gedcom uploads have been blocked for a number of months, and probably will be for a few months more (It IS pretty high on Geni's list of priorities).

Did you see any specific reference saying that you COULD upload them? If so, please let me know, and the Geni Team will probably fix it ASAP.

Shmuel-Aharon Kam,
Geni Curator

Well, I was referred here by all the Press Geni got when it got it's various rounds of funding (16.5 Million total) and so on Techcrunch one of the primary features mentioned is the ability to both import and export Gedcoms.

Techcrunch is extremely reliable, and in those various articles from '07, 08 and 09, I'm sure this was true then, but I had no reason to double check for such a feature in the moment.

Thanks for the info, and response. It would seem to me, that in the race to become the facebook of geneaology, that Geni does have a technological lead on it's competitors, but not allowing uploads of GedCom files would stop many, many passionate potential users in their tracks. In my case, noone in my family had digitized one entire side of the family, and thus, that is what I did first.

Perhaps a simple fee per upload would ease the problem. Maybe $5-$20 per gedcom file?

The problem was one of duplication. It takes a minute for someone to upload 10000 duplicates with a GEDCOM and it takes the community months to merge them and address errors. There was no mechanism to compare and look for tree duplication during the import. So it was hurting us more than helping - so they disabled it until they create a better solution. They're working on a way to allow imports without the massive duplication problem.

I understand the issue. Perhaps the point on the uploaded trees begins duplication could just be added to some sort of "merge limitation" where only the user can see where the duplication begins, and then it becomes their responsibility to work on those merges, and until they do the work one by one to merge their tree (OR just choose to accept merge points, and abandon their clearly duplicated results.

If Geni hopes to continue growing quickly and win the race to critical mass, I think importing trees from users like myself are extremely fundamental to continued growth.

Oh, I do hope GEDCOM importing returns. I really don't want to have to manually add all the information I have already found elsewhere and now have in a GEDCOM file. Please bring it back.

Interesting you should ask about this today, as 2 days ago Geni announced this: http://www.geni.com/projects/AncestorSync-for-Geni

So it's on it's way! Geni appears to be playing all their cards the right way, and with AncestorSync will start "Vacuuming up" data from seemingly every source that exists today. Really neat....

Thanks so much for letting everyone here know about the upcoming change to Geni. This will help me a great deal. Peace, Ann

I'm with the company behind AncestorSync. We need your help to make this product perform as you'd like. What we offer is a more complete data migration than GEDCOM because we access the native format of your desktop genealogy program.

If you want to give the beta a try (currently pull from Geni to your desktop) then sign up for free at: http://ancestorsync.com/beta/.

It works on both the Mac and PC and we are making improvements everyday. We hope to help get your data into Geni and back again. ;)

I just want to pinpoint that AncestorSync is a commercial product NOT developed by Geni and should not have any influence on their own product plans.
We should still ask and expect Geni to solve the GEDCOM "problem".

Right on bjorn

every six months or so I give Geni.com another try. And every single time the one thing that prevents me from using it as my primary research tool is the d***ed import feature. I don't think it has ever worked properly, ever. I see it is still not working. It's official - I'm done with Geni! :(

I never visit Geni discussions (a certain Mr. Hibbard poisoned them for me), so forgive me if this idea is a dead horse.

An idea: a tool (wizard?) that takes a GEDCOM and steps the user through adding the profiles/merging them, one by one--as one might do if we were working from paper.

This shifts much of the work onto the GEDCOM owner, and off of the community.

Private User

It is nice to see you back in the discussions we need everyones input.

Any progress on importing GEDCOMs? I've been an inert user since 2009, but with a view to uploading a GEDCOM file in due course, and I'm definitely not going to be retyping/pasting individual bits of text.

Rolando's suggestion sounds like an excellent idea, even if we have to wait for some website development. In the meantime, if it's only the volume that's an issue, why not control the rate at which records are added by GEDCOM, eg a maximum of 100 per upload and one upload per 24 hours.

Katherine,
Volume is not the issue, it is duplications of existing profiles without merging that is the problem.
If every user that did a Gedcom import followed up on it by going through all their new profiles and resolving all the merge issues that were created by the import then Geni never would have banned the imports.
At least that's my understanding.