Heredis: GEDCOM Export and Known Limitations
A privacy setting on Heredis's root person can silently export an empty GEDCOM file. Here's that bug, plus its calendar, encoding, and place-name quirks.
Heredis is a French genealogy program with a loyal user base, and its GEDCOM export has a few behaviors specific enough to cause real confusion if you don't know to look for them — starting with a bug that can produce a file with nothing in it at all.
The empty-file bug: check privacy settings on the root or primary person first
Heredis's own documentation for exporting a complete file or a single branch flags a specific, serious failure mode: if the root person (whole-file export) or the primary person (branch export) has a privacy or confidentiality restriction applied to them, the resulting GEDCOM file can come out empty — not missing a few private facts, but containing no usable data at all. This is easy to miss, because nothing about the export process itself signals an error; you get a file, it's just empty or close to it. If your Heredis export looks wrong, the first thing to check isn't your export settings — it's whether the specific person Heredis is exporting from has a privacy restriction on their own record.
Media is referenced by path, not embedded
Heredis's GEDCOM export is text-only by default: media files themselves aren't bundled into the export, only the file paths pointing to them are included. If you move the export to a different computer or send it to someone else without separately transferring the media folder, those references will point to locations that don't exist on the receiving end — the same class of problem Family Tree Maker's export has with its own media links, for the same underlying reason.
The Revolutionary calendar needs converting before export
Heredis supports entering dates using the French Revolutionary calendar, a feature most competing genealogy software doesn't have. That's useful for historical French records, but revolutionary-calendar dates generally aren't understood by other programs or by platforms expecting standard GEDCOM date formats. Heredis's export dialog includes a "Use Gregorian dates" option specifically to convert these before the file leaves Heredis — worth checking any time your tree includes dates entered in that calendar and you're exporting for use somewhere else.
Missing Byte Order Mark and encoding history
A detailed independent technical review of Heredis's GEDCOM export (by GEDCOM compliance reviewer tamurajones.net, examining Heredis 2018) documented that its UTF-8 output lacks a Byte Order Mark — a small marker some software uses to auto-detect that a file is UTF-8 rather than another encoding. Its absence doesn't make the file invalid, but it can cause an importer that relies on the BOM for auto-detection to guess wrong. The same review also reported that Heredis's exported file declared itself as GEDCOM version 5.5 while its actual UTF-8 encoding corresponds to 5.5.1 — a version-labeling mismatch worth knowing about if you're troubleshooting why a receiving program treats the file differently than its stated version would suggest.
Place names have a documented history of corruption on import/export round-trips
The same review documented specific place-name corruption after a Heredis import-then-export cycle: a place like "Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands" came back out with its parts reordered and duplicated commas, and in some cases individual parts of a place name were dropped entirely on import. If your tree originated as a GEDCOM import into Heredis and you're now exporting it back out, it's worth spot-checking a handful of place names in the result rather than assuming they round-tripped intact.
Citations don't attach to facts the way the standard allows
Heredis has also been reported as not allowing source citations to be attached directly to individual facts, attributes, or events the way the GEDCOM standard permits — a structural limitation in how Heredis models sourcing internally, not just an export quirk. If precise fact-level sourcing matters for your export's destination, this is a Heredis modeling constraint to be aware of rather than something an export setting can work around.
Before you send what you export
Given the empty-file risk above, it's worth opening any Heredis export in the Validator before sharing or uploading it — a quick way to confirm the file actually contains your data, alongside its usual checks for dangling references, one-way family links, and contradictory dates.
Sources: Heredis Help Center — Export a Complete File in GEDCOM Format; Heredis Help Center — Pro: Export a Branch in GEDCOM Format; Heredis Help Center — Windows: GEDCOM in Heredis; tamurajones.net — Heredis 2018 Impressions.
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Common questions
- Why did my Heredis GEDCOM export come out completely empty?
- The most likely cause is a privacy or confidentiality restriction applied to the root person (for a full-file export) or the primary person (for a branch export). Heredis's documented export behavior treats a restricted root or primary person as a reason to produce an empty file rather than exporting everyone else around them. Check that person's privacy setting first before assuming the export process itself is broken.
- Should I check 'Use Gregorian dates' when exporting from Heredis?
- Yes, if the receiving software isn't Heredis itself. Heredis supports the French Revolutionary calendar for entering dates, which most other genealogy programs and platforms can't read. The 'Use Gregorian dates' export option converts these to the standard calendar GEDCOM expects, avoiding dates that other software will reject or misread.
- Does Heredis's GEDCOM export include a Byte Order Mark for UTF-8 files?
- According to a detailed third-party technical review, no — Heredis's UTF-8 GEDCOM output has lacked a Byte Order Mark (BOM) across multiple versions. Some importers rely on the BOM to detect UTF-8 automatically, so its absence can occasionally cause an otherwise-valid Heredis export to be misread as a different encoding.