PAF or GEDCOM?

I like FTM for daily use, but once you use it, unless you have something like the master genalogist to inport the files you loose your photos etc when you export them to GENCOM from FTM. Another FREE program that will export the photos comes from http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder and has great reports. The church of latter day saints (LDS) has a free program for PAF's.
The GEDCOM format is universal use it. The main thing is that once you choose aprogram, stick with it. moving from one program to another will make minor changes becauce of the way each program treats the files. However; when you want to print file from another program you will have to chage it to GEDCOM anyhow, so stick to that if you like the program your using. I like the ease that FTM handles the data.. and now that I have The Master Genealogist that can read those files, I'll keep using FTM and I like ancestry.com and rootsweb.com better than Geni. Give them all a try and see what works for YOU! Remember you can try all of them for FREE untill you decide what you like the best.

Hope this helps, marv

Do the geni exports have links to the media on the geni site?

Also, since I starte out 15 years ago on Family Tree Maker, there have been a lot of changes and subsequently many times, I have imported and exported to clean up. An example is that early on, I was doing my tree in the 1-2-4-8 format where I would only show parents of the ancestor in an attempt to clean up multiple names for the same person. This resulted in a ton of duplicated references for the same person. I had gotten the tree pretty clean.

Now that FTM and Legacy have a lot of good export features, I can clean that up pretty good, but my original question is aimed to reduce down to a single off-line program and to solidify my import/export so that I do not get all the family import errors and so I can avoid having so many issues with the tree.

My goal is to get one version of my tree as clean as possible (what I call a grove because you clear out all the underbrush).

The geni exports do have media links that show up in roots magic 4, but you would have to go to each pic and download it yourself.

PS I hate FTM