On December 26th 2011 I added 25 pictures to my local tree and ran the synchronization process. According to the application everything completed successfully. When I checked my online tree, in place of all the pictures were dummy placeholders. I contacted Ancestry.com support and was told that it may take awhile for media objects to appear. When they still had not appeared after three days I contacted support again. I finally received a response on January 2nd advising me to unlink and deleted my online tree and run the process again. I did this on January 3rd and the twenty-five pictures show up.

Here's the kicker:

The member trees have not been re-indexed since mid-November 2011. If you search for someone in my tree. For example, try my great-great-grandfather, George Talmage Justus. The last match, Justus - Painter Families is my tree. Unfortunately, it is my OLD tree, the one I deleted in January! If you click on the match link you get this message:


"We are currently unable to find the tree you are trying to access. We may be experiencing technical difficulties, or it is possible that the tree owner has removed this tree."


This also means that no one will be able to see your new tree. I have discussed this with Customer Care and they said they are aware of the problem and are trying to fix it. So far I have not been able to convince them that this is a critical issue. I suggested that they should stop telling people to delete their trees to fix problems.

In my humble opinion, the cure is worse than the disease.