The problem GEDCOM import solves
If you've already done the work to build a family tree — in Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, RootsMagic, anywhere — you've probably also accumulated a couple thousand inherited photos that are not attached to any of those people. Naming them by hand is the kind of project that never finishes.
GEDCOM import is a shortcut. You export the tree you already built, drop the .ged file into Nostalgia on the web, and the archive suggests which photos in your Library belong to which person — matched by name, era, and birth/death window. Confirm or skip, photo by photo, person by person.
What GEDCOM is, in case you've never used one
GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) is the file format every major family-tree app exports to. It's a plain-text record of every person in your tree: name, dates, places, parents, spouses, children. Nostalgia reads the .ged file, builds Person records for each individual, and uses their names and date ranges to suggest matches against the photos already in your Library.
Step-by-step: from .ged file to populated archive
The flow is intentionally cautious. Nothing commits until you've reviewed it.
- Export GEDCOM from your tree app — every major one supports this. Save the .ged file locally
- Open Nostalgia on the web and go to the GEDCOM import flow under Library → People → Import
- Drop the .ged file in. You see a preview of every person Nostalgia parsed — names, dates, relationships — before anything is committed
- For each person, Nostalgia ranks the top photo candidates from your archive. The top five surface; the rest stay searchable
- Confirm matches you're sure of, skip the ones you're not, leave the rest for later. Re-imports are safe — Nostalgia merges by GEDCOM xref ID so you don't get duplicates
How the matching works
Suggestions are scored on two signals. The first is name confidence — does the photo's existing caption, Archive Note, or AI-detected text mention this person's name? The second is era confidence — does the photo's estimated decade fall inside the person's birth-to-death window, with a generous grace period for the photos taken late in life or shortly after death.
We deliberately keep the matching conservative. False positives are worse than false negatives in an archive — the cost of one wrongly-named relative is high, the cost of one un-named photo is low. You'll see five strong candidates, not fifty weak ones.
What this is, and what it isn't
GEDCOM import is read-only. Nostalgia is not trying to be your tree-editing software. Keep the canonical tree where you already keep it — Ancestry, MyHeritage, wherever — and re-import the .ged whenever you want the archive to reflect new branches. We treat your tree as a source of truth that lives somewhere else.
What we add is the photo side of the work. Once a person is named via GEDCOM (or face clustering, or manual entry), every photo of them links to the same record. Their detail page becomes a chronological photo-life of one relative. Memorial vaults can spin up from any record in one tap. Photo Story reveals can pull from a person's confirmed set. The tree is the spine; the photos hang off it.
Privacy and re-imports
The GEDCOM stays inside your private archive. We don't share it, don't cross-reference your tree against other users, don't surface anything publicly until you create a memorial vault or share a Family Vault link. Delete the imported tree any time and every derived photo link goes with it.
Re-importing is safe by design. Each person carries the GEDCOM xref ID from the original import, so the second .ged you upload merges into the existing records instead of duplicating them. Move a person between trees, add a new branch, fix a date — re-import and the archive catches up.
Try it
GEDCOM import is on the web today (mobile devices browse the result). Read the feature overview at /features/family-tree, or jump straight to the import flow at Library → People → Import. The /for-genealogists overview has more detail on how the photo-and-tree pairing fits a typical genealogy workflow.