This holiday season the designers at MyHeritage have prepared something special: At least in your virtual family home on myheritage.com you can enjoy "White Christmas". If you go to your family tree now, you should see the background covered in snow like in our celebrity tree of US president-elect Obama and his family here in the picture on the right.
Enjoy the Holiday season, with snow or without ;-)
By the way, you can always switch back to the "normal" family chart or our "classic" view with the buttons on the bottom.
Good news if you fancy becoming a MyHeritage Premium member: We have simplified our subscription plans and celebrate the launch of our new offers with a hefty christmas discount.
Get 50% off if you upgrade your family site to Premium now, that's only $1.95 per month. And you can still get even more discount, if you go Premium for more than a year.
You can also sponsor a Premium plan for the rest of the family. Or ask one of your relatives, if he makes a MyHeritage Premium plan the christmas present to your family.
And the good thing: A Premium membership is valid for the whole family site, so your relatives will benefit as well.
We're pleased to announce that our Help Center has been improved and enhanced for better support and service.
Now you can enjoy access to a larger directory of frequently asked questions to promptly cover and solve common issues when using MyHeritage.
PHOTO: MyHeritage Help Center
This directory has been compiled from the most popular questions users ask when contacting support. If new issues come up and become frequent we will be add them as new entries in the FAQ list as well, to make the MyHeritage experience as pleasant as possible.
Now you can share videos, audios and documents with your whole family
We're happy to let you know that we just introduced yet another new way of sharing memories with your family: video, audio and document sharing. Many of you are already sharing you family photos but now you can share lots of other stuff as well.
Do you have videos of your children? Digital copies of old love letters? Audio material of your grandparents? This brand new MyHeritage feature was introduced to let you share this material on your family site.
It allows you to:
- Add files to your family site's home page
- Personalise your material
- Share photos, video, documents and audio files
It's free and easily accessible from your family site, just where you are used to find the photos.
New on MyHeritage: Find family members in your email address books
We are happy to introduce our new "Find your family" feature.
It makes finding and adding people to your Family Site easier, by letting you check for family members in pretty much any email address book that you're using on the Web.
The site understands and shows you who from your email address books is already a MyHeritage member or even in your Family Tree, and then allows you to send invitations to these people.
In case you are wondering, we won't store your password or login information for any webmail you are using. So the service is very safe.
Just go to the "Find your family" option in your Family Site home page. There you can
Our look-alike meter answers the old question if a child looks like mom or dad (or like his grandpa or grandma, or one uncle or another). Many of you have emailed us cause you wanted to post your look-alike meter on your family site.
Guess what: We have just introduced that to happen automatically. So whenever you create a new look-alike meter, a small preview will be added to your family sites. Just like you can see on our Obama family site, if Malia looks like Barack or rather like Michelle Obama. If you don't want the meter to appear on the newsfeed you can always delete it with the small "x" on the right, like you can delete all "stories" from your family news feed.
And we will also put the look-alike meter in your photo albums, so you can find it there as well.
So this is for you: We have completely revamped our calendar pages! They are now called events; and besides showing national and cultural 'holiday events' and the birthdays and anniversaries from your family tree (called 'genealogy events') in a nice overview called 'upcoming', you now also have the possibility to create and add your 'personal events' to the calendar, and easily notify family members about them!
The new events section is a very useful tool to plan, announce and remember family events. It now shows you all the upcoming events for the near future, no matter if holiday events (with a palm tree symbol), genealogy events (with a balloon symbol for birthdays, rings for wedding anniversaries and a stone for death anniversaries) or personal events (with a yellow calendar symbol). And we added an improved search feature in case you have a huge family and want to find things easily (see the photo at the very end of this post).
So how to post an event? On the home page of your family site ("What's new") you can find a link in the list on the left saying 'post an event' and a blue button on the right, just below the calendar overview. And obviously there is also
Photo tagging got faster, easier to use and a pleasure to look at
Last September MyHeritage revolutionized the way you organize your digital photos. Instead of manually adding names to all the people on all your photos, like on facebook, the MyHeritage photo tagging automates this process - making it much quicker and more fun. The now released new tagging feature still finds all the faces in your photos, groups those that are the same person and let's you quickly tag them with a name from your family tree or a new name. And after you identified all family members at least once you can turn on automatic tagging, so people in new photos will mostly be tagged automatically, at least if they are from your family.
Besides: You still get automatic albums for all people you have tagged, which only include photos with them. And there is still our beautiful "face cloud" that visually shows you who's most present in your family.
Tagging at the speed of light
First thing you'll notice is the complete redesign of the interface, even though some of the biggest changes happened behind the scenes, where we made your tagging go even faster. Now, the new tagging page is not only incredibly fast, but also very reliable and working quickly even with huge photo collections.
A new sidebar
Our new tagging interface got a nice facelift. One of the additions is
Your whole family uploaded photos, tagged the people in them and created albums for the last family events? Now lean back and enjoy the beautifully animated presentations of your family photos on full screen!
Zoom in on the right face
You can now see a "slideshow" link in the sidebar of your family home page as well as the top navigation in the section "photos & videos". Once you clicked it you will be seeing the recent photos from your family site presented in our version of the "Ken Burns" effect. It is a presentation that pans over your still images and zooms into them while fading from one image to another, which gives you the impression of a movie. Don't know what that means? This presentation with photos of Barack Obama will make it more clear (pics from here).
You can see our Ken Burns presentation at its best, if you go to select album at the top and pick the photos of a person. Ken Burns will then only show photos of this person and always zoom in to where that person is on the photo. Just imagine all those yearbook photos and the like... now you will always be taken to who you are looking for.
Pick the album or person
In the select album window you will see
Let's have a closer look at our new mobile upload via email: The idea is simple
Everybody in your family gets his own email address, and whatever photo, video or document they send there, will be published to your family site. The best thing about it: You can do that with any mobile device that is capable of emailing photos. So publishing your photos taken with any iPhone, blackberry or other email enabled phone is easier than ever before.
We made it safe for your family
To prevent strangers from publishing content to your website, you get an email address that consists of
You know those balloons that appear, if you hover over names? They look like a speech bubble and give you the key info about the person they are talking about. We've recently added them to our events as well - on the home page and the event section - so without a single click you'll know what's going on. But that's just the most visual way in which the new event features have started talking.
Building upon our recent refurbishment of the main event section we have made your family events more interactive:
Your MyHeritage calendar can now talk to Outlook
Clicking on any event name in the balloon or elsewhere will take you to the new event details page. With the new "Add to Outlook" link you can export the event from your family calendar and import it to your Microsoft Outlook schedule. Nice to have some friendly family events between all the business stuff isn't it?
Greetings to your relatives - always on time
Now you can take action immediately on those events: send off the greeting now and we will deliver it on the day! You can make sure...
Family Tree Builder 4.0 Launched: Adds Maps for Visualizing the Life Journeys of Your Relatives, and Family Chat
The brand new version of our Family Tree Builder software is available now on our new download page. Version 4.0 brings significant innovations and improvements, including these highlights:
- Maps: Stunning geographic displays of where your family came from or lives today
- Photo albums: The best way to organize media files of the whole family
- Slideshow and screen saver: Showcase your photo collections
- Family Toolbar: Features Family Chat and gives direct access to your family sites
By the way: You can safely install version 4.0 on top of your current version of Family Tree Builder - be it 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 - all your data will be maintained and available you'll be able to see your family's footprints across the globe.
If you're not using Family Tree Builder yet or are using some other product, the new version 4.0 is an excellent start and you can take any existing family tree that you have in the GEDCOM format, move it over and get started quickly.
New in version 4.0: Maps show events and photos associated with each place (click to enlarge)
Even more user friendly Family Tree Builder guide!
For all those of you who are looking to start using the MyHeritage.com Family Tree Builder, or those that are already enjoying the Family Tree Builder, our user guide has been updated so it's even more easy to use and covers even more topics.
So if you download it through your Family Tree Builder you'll find 300 pages of explanations of all the features, tips and lots of images. Whether you are looking to find a step by step guide of the Family Tree Builder menu, or wondering how to edit information of family members in your tree or how to publish it online for other family members to see, it will be in the guide.
In addition, we've been busy translating it, so it is now available for Spanish and German speakers!
Here is what you can find in the new guide:
- An introduction to the Family Tree Builder, an explanation of the terms used in it and guidelines for doing your research with it. - An overview and tour of the various options of the Family Tree Builder's interface, explaining in detail what they are and how to use them.
- Suggestions on how to get started with the Family Tree Builder, with explanations on how to download and launch the program and start adding your family to it.
- A description of how to make the most of your media, such as pictures,
documents and video/audio files, detailing how to add pictures to profiles in your tree and how to mark and organize media files
- Insights into the Smart Match options and Smart Research,
If you've ever gathered you family for a slideshow of your pictures you know how enjoyable it can be to share these images and the memories that go with them. But you probably also know how disturbing it is if pictures are upside down and how quickly family members lose their patience with you having to rotate every single one of them. That's no longer, as we've introduced a photo rotation feature for your site!
When uploading your photo's, the site will auto-rotate your pictures so they display correctly and will also offer the option for you to rotate the picture manually if the rotation is incorrect.
If you already have photo's on your site, the rotation works on those as well. Simply use the manual rotation function and voila- your pictures are ready to enjoy the way they were intended.
The only thing you'll also have to do without is these pictures:
We've been working hard on improving the way in which you use your photos so you can make more of them. We already told you about our new photo rotation.
But there are two more things that several of you have asked us for and that will help you organize your photos:
* Order your photos with drag and drop. You can now order the photos within an album simply by using drag and drop. Select your photo by clicking on its border or ticking its check box and move them around in your album. By the way: The order of the photos in albums will also affect the slideshows (if you have selected that album on the top left of the slideshow fullscreen).
* Mark several photos quickly. You can now mark several photos at the same time and then use the selection for all drag & drop actions like re-ordering, moving to another folder and so on. Simply draw a rectangle with the mouse on your albums page and all photos within it will become selected.
The Best Smart Matches First: Discovering Relatives Easier
The new Quality column for your Smart Matches
You've probably used our Smart Matches - they automatically compare your tree to our database of more than 400 million other names. Smart Matches are constantly reuniting families, bringing distant relatives together, connect family historians with similar research interest and reveal to you stories and facts from other members' research. Now we are introducing Smart Match Quality and sort your matches by how exact they are.
Each match is annotated with a nice symbol of one to five stars and a quality score. Similar to what you might know from Family Tree Builder, we have added a 'Quality' column on your Family Site under 'family tree' > 'Smart Matches' (like in the picture on the right) and your results will be sorted so the best matches appear on top.
There is even more to the improvements: If you move your mouse over the stars, you will see
We're dedicated to continuously enhancing the way you can watch your photos, so that's why we're introducing improvements that give you better control while viewing through your photos. The new features are on all pages where you see one single photo (no matter if you clicked on a photo in the 'Album', 'Tag People' or the 'Find' section). Here's an overview of what has changed:
For an easier navigation, you will now find a preview of the photos of that album at the top-right hand side of the chosen photo. They show you the order the photos are in and give you a context of what other photos the album contains or what other photos of the person are tagged. You can use the arrows on the sides to browse through the album and click on the thumbnails to get to the respective photos.
For better navigation we have added left and right buttons that take you through the photos of your album. You will also find that the browser-back button is now performing at its best, allowing you to go back to the previous page whatever section or photo you were coming from.
Below the preview there is a new Expand/Collapse button (>>) to show or hide the box with all the photo details. Continue reading for the
MyHeritage.com Rounding the Corner and Closing in on a Half Billion!
Dynamic Family Photos
Thanks to our users' enthusiasm MyHeritage.com now hosts over 400 million profiles. We want to thank you for helping us grow. We hope it makes your world a little smaller, and your family tree even bigger! Our Smart Matching is loaded with more names than ever and is getting smarter by the day, with more accurate results to bring you closer to your relatives and their relatives across the world.
And to celebrate, we've made a few upgrades to our homepage.
Introducing Family Stats: Your Family's Facts and Anecdotes, All in One Place
Life Expectancy in Ages Zone
Have you ever wondered who is your oldest living relative, or what is the most common birth month of your family? How about who married the youngest, who had the most children, and whose marriage didn't make it?
Now you can access all this information easily with Family Statistics, MyHeritage.com's new analytics feature. This new feature puts at your fingertips 45 original metrics to breathe new life into your family tree and help point out errors in its data. The Family Statistics feature is 100% free and is easily accessible from both your home page and the reports page of your family site, providing visually appealing trends both numerically and in colorful charts and graphs. Best of all, the more your tree grows the more interesting and impressive the stats become.
So what can you do with the new stats?
Click on the Family Stats button (see image on left) on the home page of your family site to access the stats overview page. Here you will get a taste of the valuable information of the stats feature.
Find out about the family's gender divide, the living versus deceased in your tree, even chart the relationship status of your entire family tree. Your overview stats page also acts as a portal to six additional zones: places, ages, births, marriages, children, and divorces. Click on the links and explore more stats.
This holiday season the designers at MyHeritage have prepared something special: At least in your virtual family home on myheritage.com you can enjoy "White Christmas". If you go to your family tree now, you should see the background covered in snow like in our celebrity tree of US president-elect Obama and his family here in the picture on the right.
Today we launch our new photo features. This means 
- An overview and tour of the various options of the Family Tree Builder's interface, explaining in detail what they are and how to use them. 
If you've ever gathered you family for a slideshow of your pictures you know how enjoyable it can be to share these images and the memories that go with them. But you probably also know how disturbing it is if pictures are upside down and how quickly family members lose their patience with you having to rotate every single one of them. That's no longer, as we've introduced a photo rotation feature for your site!
We've been working hard on improving the way in which you use your photos so you can make more of them. We already told you about our 
For an easier navigation, you will now find a preview of the photos of that album at the top-right hand side of the chosen photo. They show you the order the photos are in and give you a context of what other photos the album contains or what other photos of the person are tagged. You can use the arrows on the sides to browse through the album and click on the thumbnails to get to the respective photos. 
