Since my contributors came through so well this month, I have very little space to fill. In fact, there is really no room for graphics within the articles. I had decided to do a review of the latest version of Family Tree Maker (FTM) if there was space, but it looks as if that will have to wait until another issue. FTM, like Quicken, is one of those programs that I usually skip versions of between purchases, but this time I had to buy the latest version about nine months after buying the previous version if I wanted to share data files with my sister, who had the latest version. So I might as well write a review.

That brings to mind my latest Visual Basic project: retrieving data from FTM. It works as follows: I export my FTM data to a GEDOM file (a standard genealogical data format for storing such information in text files—but which is hard to decipher if you view it with a text editor). Next, I write a VB program to retrieve the information from the GEDCOM file and store it in several tables in a Microsoft Access database, e. g. there is a table of individuals with fields for information about the individuals, and a table of families, etc.

Why do I want to do this when FTM allows me to display my data in so many ways? My two reasons are: First, I just like to be able to get at my data and not be at the mercy of some program—no matter how well-behaved the program. Second, I would like eventually to do things with the data in the genealogy section at my WWW site, http://lamartin.com, that require having the data in a database I can access using the Active Server Page (ASP) server side scripting I discussed in the February general meeting.

My second recent project was to create a contact sheet for a roll of 35 mm film using my HP PhotoSmart scanner and my ALPS MD 1300 printer. A contact sheet has all the photos on the roll printed at a size so that the entire roll fits on one sheet of paper. I always had the ability to do this—it would just have taken forever since the scanner software would only allow me to work with one frame of the negatives at a time. And with that image from one negative, I would then have to size it appropriately, etc. One such contact sheet, very much reduced in size & sharpness, is at the end of the article.

The solution to my problem was a piece of shareware called VueSmart from Hamrick software for the HP PhotoSmart scanner that allows batch scanning. VueSmart scans in all the negatives on a strip up to 8 frames long and creates a separate graphics file for each frame of size and format of your choosing, which are then all opened in your default viewer for that graphics format. In my case, for each negative strip of four frames, I have four pictures opened in Corel Photo-Paint each of which I simply copy and paste in a row to another 8.5 x 11 window I have open in Photo-Paint. To do a roll of 24 requires repeating this six times and takes about 16 minutes.

I then also have the 24 individual thumbnail sized graphics files, which I may at a later date use in a database of my photos, and I have the Photo-Paint page containing all 24. I certainly save this page, and I also print it out using the ALPS in photographic quality mode. The results are stunning.