Ancestry's GEDCOM export does not include photos, and the website has no button to download your gallery. If you have added hundreds of pictures and scans over the years, that is a real problem the day you want them on your own disk.

There is a route. It goes through a desktop program.

The two programs that sync with Ancestry

RootsMagic has a feature called TreeShare that connects to your Ancestry account and downloads a tree, including media, into a RootsMagic database on your computer. The free RootsMagic Essentials version can do it.

Family Tree Maker has FamilySync, which does the same and is what many Ancestry users already own.

Both save the photos and documents into a media folder on your disk as part of the download. That folder is what you are after.

The steps

  1. Install RootsMagic or Family Tree Maker.
  2. Inside the program, sign in to Ancestry (TreeShare in RootsMagic; FamilySync in Family Tree Maker).
  3. Choose the tree and download it. For a large tree with a lot of media this takes a while.
  4. When it finishes, find the media folder the program created. RootsMagic puts it next to the database, named Media. Family Tree Maker puts a Media folder next to the .ftm file.
  5. Export a GEDCOM from the desktop program (see its guide).
  6. Open the GEDCOM in GED-VIEW and connect the media folder from step 4 with Connect media folder in the file menu.

The photos and documents now show on the people and sources they belong to, and you hold your own copy of everything.

What you get

Photos you uploaded, documents you uploaded, and record images you attached from Ancestry's collections, at least those the program can download.

What you might not get

Some record images are subject to licensing and the desktop programs cannot always fetch them. The citation comes through but not the image. Ancestry has also been known to change what outside programs are allowed to pull. If a download comes through with gaps, that is usually why.

Next

Once the media is on your disk, keep it there and back it up. A folder of the family's photos on your own computer is worth more than the same folder on any website.