How to Use a Family Tree Maker Offline (and Why That Proves Your Photos Are Safe)

Most family tree platforms treat your photos like cargo. You upload them to their servers, they store them, and a privacy policy explains what they may do with them. That is the deal, whether you read the policy or not.

Photo Family Tree works the other way around. Everything — the editor, the layout engine, the autosave, the export — runs inside your browser tab on your machine. Your photos are stored in your browser's own database on your own disk. The consequence is a claim almost nobody else in genealogy can make, and it is easy to verify: once the page has loaded, you can switch off your Wi-Fi and keep working.

This post is the practical version of that claim: what works offline, what does not, how to prepare for a no-internet session, and where the trick fails.

The thirty-second test

If you are the type who doesn't believe marketing, good. Try this:

1. Open the family tree maker and wait for the page to finish loading.
2. Switch off Wi-Fi, or unplug the network cable. Watch the icon die.
3. Add a person. Type a name, a year, a note. Add another and connect them.
4. Export the tree as a PNG. Open the file. It is right there.

Nothing stalls, nothing errors, nothing "retries" in the corner. There is no server to reach, so there is no server to fail. A tool that uploads your photos cannot offer this test — airplane mode would freeze it mid-upload. That asymmetry is the whole point: you are not trusting our promise, you are watching your machine do all the work while the outside world is unplugged.

One honest caveat before you write the claim on a fridge magnet: the initial page load needs the internet, because the page itself comes from the web. And refreshing the tab while offline will fail for the same reason. The offline superpower applies after the page is in your browser.

What exactly runs locally

It is worth knowing which parts of the tool live on your side, because that is what makes the offline trick work at all.

The editor. Adding people, wiring relations, dragging cards, choosing themes — all of it is JavaScript executing on your device. The tree layout you see is computed in your browser, not fetched as a picture from somewhere.

The autosave. Every change is written to IndexedDB, a database that browsers maintain on your disk for exactly this purpose. Your photos, stored as data URLs, live in the same place. When you close the tab and come back tomorrow (online, to load the page again), the tree reappears because your browser reads its own database — not because a server remembered you.

The export. The high-resolution PNG is rendered by your browser's own graphics engine and handed to you as a download. The file goes straight from memory to your disk.

None of these steps has a network call to make. That is not a promise about intent; it is a description of where the code runs.

When offline actually helps

The airplane-mode trick sounds like a stunt until you remember where family history actually gets done.

The family home in the village with no usable internet, where the photo albums live. The long flight where your aunt finally tells the story behind the 1962 wedding photo. The cottage with one bar of signal that everyone is fighting over. The school computer lab where the filter blocks half the web. The hospital waiting room. The archive basement with no signal, where you brought scans precisely so you could work on them between record pulls.

In all of these, a browser tool that needed a server round-trip for every edit would be useless. This one keeps going, battery and patience permitting.

Preparing a deliberate offline session

If you know you will be offline — a flight, a trip to the grandparents — a minute of preparation makes it smooth.

Load the page while you still have connectivity, and let it finish. If you already have a tree, open it and confirm your people and photos are all there, because the browser needs the page and your data is read from local storage after load. Then just leave the tab open. A sleeping laptop wakes up with the tab intact; you keep working from where you stopped.

If you want a photo you have not added yet, add it before you go offline — picking a file from disk works offline too, but only for photos you attach to new work in the session; anything that involves loading a new web page will not.

Keep the tab, not twenty tabs. Browsers eventually discard background tabs under memory pressure, and while your data is safe in local storage, the session itself is cheapest to keep in one place.

What will not work offline

Being precise about the limits is part of being trustworthy, so here they are.

Refreshing or reopening the page. The tab needs the internet to load the application in the first place. Offline refresh shows a browser error — your tree is not lost, it is in local storage, but you need a connection to get the tool back on screen. Reconnect, reload, and everything reappears.

This blog, the template gallery, anything else on the site. Those are web pages like any other.

Moving a tree to another device. By design, there is no account and no sync, so there is no channel through which a tree could travel. If you build a tree on a laptop and want it on a tablet, you export the PNG and share the image — the picture travels, the editable project stays where you made it. For most families the printed or shared poster is the point anyway; the printing guide covers sizes and resolution. People who need editable sync between devices are exactly the people a server-based tool is built for, and that trade is worth understanding rather than hiding.

Clearing browser data deletes the tree. IndexedDB lives in your browser's storage, so "clear site data" and "clear browsing data" remove it. If your machine is shared, or you are the sort of person who runs cleaning tools on a schedule, export the tree as a PNG occasionally — a picture of the tree is not editable, but it is not deletable by a cache purge either.

One related warning: private/incognito windows throw away their storage when closed. A tree built in an incognito tab is a sandcastle. Use a normal window.

Why "we can't see your photos" is finally checkable

Every genealogy platform has a privacy page. Most say some version of "we take your privacy seriously," and you have no way to check. The offline test turns the promise into something observable.

If the tool keeps working with the network cable pulled out, there is no upload pipeline. Not "the upload is encrypted," not "we delete photos on request" — no pipeline. Your photos sit in your browser's storage, the layout engine runs on your CPU, and the export never leaves your disk. The only data that ever touched a server was the page's own code, back when you first loaded it.

That is also why the offline trick matters for photos of living people — kids, a relative who is ill, a family mid-divorce. Some pictures you are not ready to hand to a company, a data center, or a future acquisition. With a local tool the question never comes up, because there is no "up."

For the supply side of this hobby — getting the physical prints into the computer in the first place — see the guides on scanning old family photos and organizing what you find. And if you are still comparing tools, the checklist in what makes a family tree maker genuinely free includes "what happens to uploaded photos" as a question worth asking any platform before you hand over the album.

The short version

Load the page once with internet. After that, the internet is optional — and you can prove it to yourself in thirty seconds with the Wi-Fi switch. Your tree autosaves to your own browser's storage, exports from your own machine, and your photos never sit on anybody's server, ours included.