Stories, photos, and events

Beyond names and dates, each person has a story, photos and videos, a profile picture, a Life timeline of dated events, and Sources & documents.

Stories

Every person has a Story: an open-ended biography written in Markdown. Select the person, then switch to the Story tab at the top of the side panel (the other tab, Details, holds the details, photos, timeline and documents below).

The editor supports the basics: headings, bold, italic, and underline, bulleted and numbered lists, blockquotes, and links. The toolbar buttons write the formatting for you.

Some patterns that work well:

A short paragraph at the top with the one-sentence summary ("Emigrated from Cork in 1872, settled in Boston, ran a grocery on Tremont Street until 1908.")
A citation after each claim, added with Cite a record (below).
Inline questions like "Need to confirm birth year; death certificate says 1844 but census says 1846."

Stories save when you press Save. An Unsaved badge at the top of the panel shows while the story differs from the saved version, and closing the panel asks before discarding it.

Inline citations

You can anchor any sentence in the story to something attached to the same person. While editing, the Cite a record panel under the editor lists every photo, document, link and text note attached to the person. Click one to insert a citation at the cursor. Readers see it as a small § chip carrying the citation's label; clicking it scrolls to that item. Events can't be cited.

The on-disk syntax is a regular Markdown link with the cite: scheme:

Born in Plattsburgh in 1871 [baptism record](cite:MEDIA_ID).

MEDIA_ID must be a photo, document, link or text note already attached to the same person; the app refuses to save a new citation to anything else. The Cite a record picker only offers items that are attached, so the citations you insert always resolve. If you delete a cited item, its citation reads as plain text and the story still saves; undoing the deletion brings the citation back.

Photos and videos

The Photos & videos section of the person's details panel is for visual media: photos, formal portraits, and short videos. If you can edit the tree you can either Upload a file directly (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, MP4, WebM, or QuickTime; up to 25 MB for images, 250 MB for video) or From URL to paste a link to an existing file. On a computer you can also drag files from your desktop onto Photos & videos; they upload one after another, as Upload does, and a PDF among them is filed as a document. Uploaded files are stored privately and served back via short-lived signed URLs. Uploading photos, videos and PDFs comes with the tree owner's Family Plan, so anyone invited to edit a Family Plan tree can upload, plan or not. On a tree without it, Upload and Upload PDF are marked Family Plan; the tree keeps one uploaded portrait per person (the profile picture; uploading a new profile picture replaces it) and can add any number of items by URL. From URL saves a copy of the picture with the tree on a Family Plan tree, and for the profile picture on any tree; otherwise a photo or video keeps only its web address, and Open under it shows it on the site it comes from.

Each item has a type (photo / portrait / video), a short title that appears as the item's display name, an optional longer caption for descriptive context, and a source for attribution. If you omit the title the item falls back to the type name.

To delete a photo, video or document, choose the trash icon beside it and confirm. It disappears from the tree, its exports and any public link straight away, and stops counting toward your storage. Choose Undo in the message that appears, or at the top of the tree, to bring it back with its file, as the profile picture again if it was one. Draw My Tree keeps a deleted file for 30 days, then removes it for good.

Profile picture

The avatar at the top of the panel is the picture on the person's card. If you can edit the tree, click it to upload a new photo as the profile picture. To use a photo already attached, choose Set as profile under it in Photos & videos; Clear profile takes the designation off. Videos and documents are never offered.

A picture you upload from the avatar is resized to 512 pixels on its longest side before it is stored. When you choose a larger photo with Set as profile, Draw My Tree makes a 512-pixel copy of it in your browser for the avatar, so cards and exports load quickly, and the photo itself stays as you uploaded it.

The photo wall

The photo wall shows every picture in the tree at once, grouped by person, eldest first. Each person's profile picture comes first, then their other photos and videos. Documents and links stay in their Details.

Open People in the panel rail and choose Photo wall, or press Ctrl+K (⌘+K on a Mac) and type "photo".
Choose Everything, Portraits (one picture per person) or People with no picture (No picture on a phone) to change what the wall shows.
Choose a picture or a name to open that person's Details on the tree. Back to the tree, the browser's back button, or Esc leaves the wall.

Pictures load as you scroll, so a large tree opens quickly. The address ends in ?view=photos while the wall is open, so you can bookmark it or send it to someone who can open the tree. On a tree without the Family Plan, a note at the bottom says that the tree keeps one uploaded portrait per person, with See the Family Plan.

Relatives viewing a public link can open the photo wall too. It shows only what the link shows: people the link hides as Private are left out, with their pictures.

Life timeline and sources

Two sections of Details hold what documents the person, apart from the open-ended Story. If you can edit the tree you can add to both.

Life timeline holds the vital dates and places and any events you add with Add to timeline: dated facts (marriage, divorce, census, burial, immigration, a newspaper mention, a will or estate, land or property, a religious ceremony, occupation, residence, and any other record). Each has a date, place, short summary, and an optional source URL.

Sources & documents holds the rest:

Upload PDF and Document: a PDF or scan, uploaded from your computer with Upload PDF or linked with Document from where it is held (archive site, Google Drive).
Link: a generic external URL (a Wikipedia article, a blog post, a YouTube clip), or a source with no web address, such as a census or a family bible: give it a Title and leave Web address (optional) empty. A source citation imported from a GEDCOM file is a link of this kind.
Text: inline prose for poems, transcripts, oral-history recollections (anything you'd rather keep on the person than in a separate file).

Events that belong to a couple (marriage, divorce) are kept on their link: open it with the link icon beside the partner's name under Family. Pencil and trash icons beside each event edit or remove it there. Each partner's Life timeline also lists the couple's events in date order, named for the partner ("Marriage to Haru Ikeda"); select one to open the link. They carry no edit controls on the timeline, and a partner the view hides, or shows only as Private, leaves their events out.