How to get started with Oxy-Gen

1 Select GEDCOM

Open Oxy- Gen from its shortcut. Read the shareware message – the program is free, but donations are welcome. Click ‘OK’, then click the Français drop- down menu and choose English. Click ‘Browse’ next to ‘Genealogical file’ to browse for and select your chosen GEDCOM file.

2 Choose your basic settings

Click ‘Browse’ next to ‘Output File‘ to select a folder to save your files to – we recommend creating a dedicated folder for this task in ‘File Explorer’. Leave HTML selected as the output format for creating a website.

3 Tweak options

Click the ‘Options’ button. First, select ‘General > Places’ to set a default country ( United Kingdom if most of your ancestors originate from here) and to set place name order. Use ‘General > Century’ to introduce a cut- off for living ancestors.

4 Pick your HTML settings

Select HTML – choose ‘Light and fast’ or ‘Detailed’, then work through the sub-menus looking for further tweaks to make. Visit oxy-gen

soft.net/doc_options_en.php for information on each setting. Picture height should be set in pixels (try 400 as a starting point).

5 Convert to HTML

Click the ‘Convert’ button and wait for the pages to generate. The index page will open in your browser. Any images correctly linked in the GEDCOM file will be copied over as well. Don’t like what you see? Click ‘Options’, make changes and then click ‘Convert’ again.

6 Create family photos

Oxy- Gen can also create web pages showing individual photos with annotations of who’s in them. Click ‘Family Photos’ to select your photo. Don’t worry that it appears squashed – it’ll display correctly. Type a surname into the empty box and click ‘Find’ to list individuals.

7 Link names and create thumbnails

Click a name in the right-hand list and it’ll appear in the left-hand pane. Select the name, then click and drag a circle around that person’s head to select it in red (if you get it wrong, just click and drag again until it’s correct). Select your next person and repeat.

8 Generate your page

Click ‘Save’ to save your work in an XML file, allowing you to work on multiple files at once. When you’re happy, click ‘Generate HTML page’ and save the file in your data folder. People can then double- click the file to view the annotated photo in their web browser.