Digital Workshop

Has anyone used an Opus product to store and display family history details and associated multimedia records?

I'm reasonably far-advanced in one such project, and would be interested in discussing issues and swapping ideas.

I am our family archivist and genealogist. I am in the process of putting together several Opus programs for displaying various historical items. I wouldn't use Opus as a main program for storing and retrieving genealogy data, photos and multimedia files as there are many very good cheap programs on the market that do the job already; and, these programs generally have a loyal customer base backed up by a software development team. My personal choice is RootsMagic. It can produce anything from a photo album with multimedia content to a book. However, I do put specific items into Opus programs such as my grandmother's journal begun in 1883. Opus gives me a lot more flexibility in navigation, presentation, animation and automation. If you have specific issues I will be happy to help. Good luck with your project.

Paul

Hi Paul
Over more than 25 years I compiled the history for the 2 main lines of my family. This covered 15 generaltions and included several thousands of individuals, some of whome were covered in great deatial, others who rated a bare mention. This is a reasonably significant collection of information which in the normal way includes personal data, sources, photographs, individual personal histories, extensive social, cultural and chrnological histories, sound clips, etc.

Over those 25 years I tried many of the free, cheap and expensive programs, including RootsMagic and Personal Ancestral File. None of those provided everything that some of my target audience felt were needed.

I started looking into whether or not Opus might provide a solution. So far, I have managed to produce a result that seems to work, except for providing the actual charts.

Initially, I was concerned that an effective use of Opus might involve using a database -- which I rejected out of hand.

The only duplication of information between records occurs with an individual's name because it might appear in personal, ancestral, or descendant links. I found it simple, using Opus, to just cut and paste these. Sounds primitive when compared to a DB, but it works.

Using Opus for genealogy can be successful, but it takes a lot of preparation to get the structures, templates and links right.