Find A Grave

540,365

Which database fields are searched

Media items are images, documents of various types, and even recordings or videos that are attached to people, events, and places, and are defined in a database table. This page searches three descriptive fields in that table:

1. Title, which is no more than one line long. All media items have a title.
   (The title of each media item is listed in the "Description" column in the search results, and serves as a hyperlink that displayes the full media item.)
2. Description is longer than the title, but usually no more than a few lines long. Media items should have a description, but many do not.
   (The description of each media item is also listed in the "Description" column the search results.)
3. BodyText is a block of text that
   • Can be arbitrarily large,
   • Typically supplies additional information about a media item, and
   • Can have rich formatting (i.e. headings, paragraphs, bold text, colors, etc.)
   (The BodyText value of a media item can be seen only if you view the full media item.)

Significantly, not all media items are individual files; the entire text of some stories is stored in the media item's BodyText field rather than in a separate Word, PDF, or HTML document.

425,240

What's in the 'Gallery'

The Gallery shows just thumbnail images; no descriptive text to identify media items. It may be useful only for photos. Significantly, media items without thumbnails do not appear in the Gallery.

Media items that are not likely to have thumbnails include

1. Non-images such as Word documents, PDF's, HTML pages, etc.
2. Images that were scanned from books and other documents. In truth, it wouldn't be hard to generate thumbnails for those images, and some do have thumbnails, but it isn't generally worthwhile to do so, since thumbnails of scanned documents are usually too small to reveal anything useful about the document.

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