I have finally given up on FamilyTree Maker for Mac!

FamilyTree Maker is developed and distributed by ancestry.com.

I do not know for how long I have been trying to make FTM to work on my Macs, without succeeding. Many years and many versions.

I have purchased both the Mac and the Win version to see if they could somehow compensate for each others problems, but if the win version resolves one problem on the Mac version, it creates other problems.

My problems have been mainly importing gedcom files from Reunion 8, 9 and now 10. For a while I was constantly nagging the tech support about the photo linking when importing gedcom, until they created an extra Reunion gedcom import choice. But still, it did not work perfectly.

The main problems have been the photo handling. When I export gedcom from Reunion it also exports the links to the photo source folder, but FTM for Mac was not able to «connect», while FTM Win was. I complained about a missing feature for reconnecting photos, and finally they made one.

But you could not control where FTM should look for them. So if you had a copy of a photo associated with FTM in the trash, you could be quite sure it would find it and reconnect it, even though the same photo also was situated in the correct media folder.

Now with FTM Mac 3 the photo link problem is still there. Manageable yes, but optimal? No!
An other problem now , in version FTM 3Mac is that a bunch of first names are omitted in the gedcom import. It seems (but I am not sure), this happens with persons with Suffixes added to their names. All first names and some last names are omitted. Only the suffix is there, but placed in the name field.

By importing from Reunion the dates are not «real» dates. It looks real, but they are not. If you want to use the calculation function in the date field (the little calculator that comes up when you click in the field), you will se it does not work. The message is «wrong date format…» bla bla…»

An other way to see this is to try to change the date format in settings; you will see it does not change. Because it is «dead data».
I have now tried all possible ways to get my Reunion data into FTM 3 Mac, via Mac Family Tree 7.2.3, via FTM 2014 Win, back and fort – but no. It just is not possible to migrate from Reunion to FTM Mac/Win in any way in the world.

I have given up tech support, the answers you get, that said if you are getting any answers at all, are idiotic. They either do not read you whole explanation, and asks things that are already explained in the text, they answer you with «did you remember to plug the power..» kind of answers or they never understand the issue or they completely ignore your request with the comment «this seems to be a gedcom issue, and might as well be a Reunion problem. Nothing we can do». Case closed!

I finally decided to give up on FamilyTree Maker for Mac and for Windows.

I will probably migrate to Mac Family Tree 7.2.3. After import everything seems ok. MFT has an aggressive maintenance policy, new updates and versions are coming out regularly, and they are not charging you unless the launch huge updates. It also comes in my native language, and the reports are the best amongst all genealogy apps.