Tech Forum

Is there a way to copy a photo, say from the Individual to the Head of Household position? I can move it back and forth, but would like to have the photo in both places.

The photo was taken on a phone and uploaded directly to an individual. The photo did not remain on the phone, so it cannot even be uploaded again for the household entry.

Did you try downloading via right-click, "Save image as ..."?

The only way to do it is to open the LDS.org Directory on a web browser and download the individual photo, then upload it again as the household photo. A copying feature would be really useful in YSA wards and stakes, where the household and individual photos are always the same and so have to be uploaded twice for each person.

sbradshaw wrote:The only way to do it is to open the LDS.org Directory on a web browser and download the individual photo, then upload it again as the household photo.

Well, that works, except that I had to download another browser because the site won't even attempt Firefox, and the second "copy" is pixellated to pieces. I may have to break down and dress up again for another shot. Sigh.

I hear you on the need for a real copy function.

Ideally, the household photo would get "mapped" to the individual if:

• There is no Household photo
• There is only one member in the household

(I was tempted to add another condition - the member is single. But the case of a non-member spouse is easy to fix by adding a household photo.)

lajackson wrote: Well, that works, except that I had to download another browser because the site won't even attempt Firefox, and the second "copy" is pixellated to pieces.

I use Firefox all the time to copy pictures and I had that same problem for a while. When you copy them, it cannot be the smaller version you see in "Photos". Double click the picture you want to copy so that a larger pop out version. Right click and save image from the larger image. That should prevent your pixilation problem.

sbradshaw wrote:The only way to do it is to open the LDS.org Directory on a web browser and download the individual photo, then upload it again as the household photo. A copying feature would be really useful in YSA wards and stakes, where the household and individual photos are always the same and so have to be uploaded twice for each person.

russellhltn wrote:Ideally, the household photo would get "mapped" to the individual if:

• There is no Household photo
• There is only one member in the household

(I was tempted to add another condition - the member is single. But the case of a non-member spouse is easy to fix by adding a household photo.)

Here is what I see in my ward:

Single-member household with an individual photo and no household photo

• Household view shows no photo for the household and the photo on the individual
• Photo directory shows the individual photo
• Calling view shows the individual photo

Single-member household with a household photo and no individual photo

• Household view shows the photo for the household and no photo on the individual
• Photo directory shows the household photo
• Calling view shows no photo

Household with multiple members with a household photo and an individual photo

• Household view shows the photo for the household and the photo for the individual
• Photo directory shows the household with the household photo
• Calling view shows the individual photo

Household with multiple members with a household photo and no individual photo

• Household view shows the photo for the household and no photo for the individual
• Photo directory shows the household with the household photo
• Calling view shows no photo

Household with with multiple members no household photo and an individual photo

• Household view shows no photo for the household and the photo for the individual
• Photo directory shows the household with no photo
• Calling view shows the individual photo

LCR always shows the individual photo on the member profile. LDS Tools shows the individual photo if one exists and then falls back to the household photo.

In sbradshaw's case (YSA stake), the photo should be uploaded once as the individual photo and that should cover every use case.

russellhltn's suggestion to map the household photo to the individual for a single-member household would solve the case where a member with a household photo but no individual photo doesn't have a photo in the calling view. Uploading the photo as the individual photo instead of the household photo would do the same thing.

Changing the photo service to handle that condition (if no individual photo exists, find the household, see if there is anyone else in the household, and serve the household photo instead) would also solve that problem at the expense of some extra processing time for every request where an individual photo doesn't exist. It also creates the potential for an issue to occur where the photo display was working (the photo appeared) and suddenly stopped working because the household no longer has a single member. Ironically, sbradshaw's YSA stake would be one of the most affected. If two members in his stake had a household photo but no individual photo, everything would work fine. When they got married, their photos would suddenly stop appearing in some locations without them having changed anything (except for having gotten married).

That's good to know – if only the individual photo is uploaded for a single-member household, it will display everywhere. However, the biggest box and section on the LDS.org Directory is the household box, instead of the individual section, so usually if a clerk adds a photo in one place, they add it in the household place, because they can see it bigger and it's at the top...

Maybe the entire "household" section could be disabled for single-member households and information just copied up from "individual" where needed.

A few years ago, one of the church developers suggested that they were looking at automatically copying the photo for single members. i.e., for singles, if you upload a household photo, it automatically copies it to the individual photo if no individual photo exists, and vice-versa. Of course, if you were updating an existing photo, there is no blank photo, so you would still get stuck having to upload two photos.

I kind of like sbradshaw's idea of disabling the "household" section for single-member households; of course, I'm not looking at the code and have no idea how easy that would be. Maybe the code just disables editing the household section for singles and when updates are made to the individual record, the code writes the data to both the individual member info and the household info. The major issue I see there is the initial rollout of such a feature and determining what to do if a single has conflicting information for household and individual: you'd need some kind of merge resolution routine.