How To Add Photos To An Ancestry Tree

Have you got photos of your great-grandparents that you want to add to your Ancestry tree?

Would you like a picture to be displayed as your ancestor’s profile image in the tree?

Have you spotted an image in other members’ trees that you would like to copy in the right way?

This step-by-step guide will show you how to achieve these tasks.

Uploading Photos To Your Ancestry Family Tree

Follow these steps to add a photo to someone in your family tree.

  1. Click on the tree entry of the person of interest and open their Profile.
  2. Navigate to the Gallery tab, which is beside the Facts tab.
  3. Click the “Add” button on the right of the screen and choose “Upload Photos”.
  4. Click the “Choose files” green button to open a file explorer on your local machine.
  5. Find the local image file and “Open” or “Upload” it.
  6. Wait for the “Done” button to appear, which shows the upload has completed.
  7. When you click on Done you will see the photo in the Gallery.

How To Add A Profile Picture On Ancestry

Follow these quick steps to add a profile picture on Ancestry:

  1. Add the photo to the person in your tree.
  2. Expand the menu under the person’s name.
  3. Choose “Use as Profile image”.

You can now return to the profile page. You will see the photo as the profile image.

A video Walkthrough From Our Youtube channel

If you’d like a video walkthrough, here you go. Then read on because we cover some additional aspects and scenarios in this blog post.

YouTube player

What Is Ancestry’s Media Gallery?

Every tree has its own Media Gallery. You access the Media Gallery within a tree by opening the drop-down menu under the tree name.

The Media Gallery shows you all uploaded photos and other media.

Here is an excerpt of mine:

But this full list doesn’t display which person, if any, is linked to the piece of media. You need to click on the photo to see who it’s linked to in your tree.

The alternative view is to look at the media gallery associated with a particular tree profile.

When you open a tree profile, you land on the Facts tab of the profile. Its own gallery is right beside the Facts tab.

Media Gallery Photos Versus Tree Profile Photos

All photos that you upload go into the media gallery of the tree.

But each photo you upload via the Person Profile page does not automatically get set to be the profile image.

You need to take some extra steps described in the earlier instructions.

Although most of your photos will be linked to a person in your tree, they don’t have to be. You can unlink a photo from a profile.

This removes the photo from the tree profile gallery, but it stays in the tree gallery. You can attach it to someone else, or leave it floating unattached.

What’s The Difference Between The Two Upload Buttons?

Our instructions advised you to use the “Add” drop-down to upload a photo. I took this route because it specifically has an “Upload photo” menu item.

The alternative is to use the “Upload media” button in the middle of the page.

So, what’s the difference?

You’ll use the media button if you’re dealing with file types other than photos. These could be PDFs or word processing documents.

However, you can also upload your photos via “Upload media”. The dialog box is slightly different, as Ancestry asks you to define what type of media you are providing.

Notice that “Portrait” is the first option.

You don’t actually have to set any of this additional information.

Portrait is the default type

Be aware that if the file is an image and you don’t set it to “headstone” or any other choice – Ancestry decides that its is a Portrait and labels it as such in the media gallery.

This has caught me out. In the gallery for my main tree, I have a shed load of images of newspaper clippings. These are primarily obituaries.

Most of them are labelled as a portrait because I didn’t bother setting the type to “Document/Certificate”.

Does it matter? No, not really. But it’s usually better to label things properly for the benefit of others.

Removing Photos From Your Ancestry Family Tree

To remove a photo completely from your Ancestry tree, go to the Media Gallery in the Tree menu.

The delete button is on the right-hand side of the screen. This removes the photo from the Ancestry servers. It doesn’t touch your local file.

You can’t remove photos from the media gallery associated with a person profile, as it doesn’t have a delete button.

How To Change A Profile Picture In Your Ancestry Tree

You can deselect the current profile picture from the same place where you set it (see the instructions at the top of the article).

You just need to untick the menu item as I’ve highlighted in the picture below. This leaves the photo linked to the person, but not as the profile image.

To change to a different profile picture, just upload a new photo and go through the instructions at the top of the article.

If you’ve realized that you assigned the photo to the wrong person in your tree, you can deselect the photo from one person, and attach it to someone else in your tree.

What Type of Image File Can You Upload?

If you’ve taken the photo with your cell phone or any camera, the file format will upload fine to Ancestry.

But you may have some old files in a less used format. If the file extension isn’t on the list below, you will need to convert it to one of these formats:

  • jpg
  • jpeg
  • png
  • tiff
  • bmp

Is There A Size Limit On Image Files?

The size limit is 15 MB. This is actually quite big for a photo!

However, if you find yourself falling foul of the limit, you can take a few steps to reduce the size.

My favorite online compression tool is tinypng, which is completely free and doesn’t need any registration or email.

Uploading Photos To Ancestry From Your iPhone

I don’t have an iPhone, so I’ll link to the instructions from this genealogy site.

I can’t verify if it works, though. Drop me a comment below if it doesn’t work for you.

Uploading Photos To Ancestry From Your Android phone

I took a ton of headstone photos on my Android phone in the summer of 2017 and uploaded them to my main Ancestry tree.

But I didn’t connect directly from my phone to the Ancestry website for several reasons.

Firstly, I didn’t want to use up my phone bandwidth. Secondly, I wanted copies of the photographs on my laptop.

If you’re working with single photos here and there, it’s easy to send them from your phone gallery to your personal email and download form there to your personal computer.

If you’re working with many photos at a time, you can look into syncing an entire gallery folder to your home computer or an external drive.

Protecting Photos In Your Tree

Many people don’t like it when photos are copied from their tree and uploaded to another user’s tree – without any credit or attribution.

This doesn’t bother me much, but I understand the frustration for others.

Check out our article on ways to protect photos in your online family tree.

Saving Photos From Other Ancestry Trees

I was browsing pedigree pages of my matches recently, and my eye was caught by an unusual sight.

Do you see what it is? There is a profile photo displaying for the home person of the tree, alongside her name and dates.

That never happens, right? Because our matches are living, we don’t see their details at the far left of the pedigree page.

Unfortunately, this lady died since the last time I looked at the tree. The administrator of her tree has entered her death details in her public tree, and hence I see her photograph and vital events.

Suppose I wanted to copy her photograph into an entry in my family tree. There are two ways to go about this: a bad way and a good way.

Don’t save other people’s images and re-upload

I’m a tech professional who doesn’t always read the software manual. So, I first used the bad way for copying photographs.

That was before I noticed that other Ancestry members on social media were expressing disapproval of this method.

The method involves using your browser to download the image to your local computer. Just right-click the picture and click “Save image”.

You can then use the upload instructions detailed here to add to an entry in your family tree.

Losing attribution

What’s the problem? Well, you’ve just lost the attribution trail i.e. where the picture came from.

A pillar of genealogy research is source citation. You’ve broken any link to the source.

The other problem is that it is bad etiquette.

The person who uploaded this photograph has kindly made it available to be viewed and copied. That person should receive credit.

If you’re like I was, you may have no idea that there is an alternative way that keeps attribution and provides credit.

Here is how to do that…

Use Ancestry’s save feature to save a photograph to your tree

To copy a photograph with attribution, you should click on the photograph within the other member’s family tree.

You are given a link to “Save to my tree” which opens a dialog box.

You can now choose one of your own trees.

Then use the little search box to find the person in your tree. The photo will enter the media gallery of your tree and will be associated with the person you specified.

But the attribution is kept. Details and links to the original tree owner and the specific tree is kept with the image.

Here is an example from one of my trees:

Looking for an E-Book On Building Your Ancestry Tree?

Our e-book on building your family tree with Ancestry.com is available on Amazon at a budget price.

Like Video Tutorials?

If you would like to watch short video tutorials that walk through using Ancestry features step-by-step, browse through the DataMiningDNA YouTube channel.

.

Margaret created a family tree on a genealogy website in 2012. She purchased her first DNA kit in 2017. She created this website to share insights and how-to guides on DNA, genealogy, and family research.

2 thoughts on “How To Add Photos To An Ancestry Tree”

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.