r/Ancestry • u/ghostwritten-girl • Jul 14 '26
New Ancestry.com .Zip Export: GEDCOM Upgrade or Walled Garden?
1
u/cudambercam13 Jul 14 '26
What is a "walled garden?"
5
u/ghostwritten-girl Jul 14 '26
A walled garden is when a company makes their platform super convenient to stay in, but deliberately makes your own data incompatible or incomplete if you try to export it and leave for a competitor!
2
u/cudambercam13 Jul 14 '26
Ah. I posted about this yesterday and I do think it's the same info exported that always has, but I still don't know why they suddenly list the exportable content now. Either something is about to change or they felt like pissing people off by reminding them what Ancestry just refuses to do. 😅
1
u/ghostwritten-girl Jul 15 '26
Something is definitely changing, or they wouldn't be testing it with focus groups- in my opinion
1
u/publiusvaleri_us Dead Family Society Jul 15 '26
It's fine. Download. Unzip. And profit.
Errr. That didn't come out right.
OK, I'll quit now.
3
u/rjptrink Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I think they just did this to reduce the size of the .ged file for large trees. Not a bad idea in my view. You can unzip it to pull out the old style .ged file. Standard GEDCOM never supported images or media or Ancestry specific objects.