I am what you might call a semi-professional genealogist. I have written up case studies and been published in a number of state-level genealogy magazines. I use Family Tree Maker (FTM) but would not recommend it. The only reason I use it is I started out with it and used a lot of workarounds to get it to do what I wanted. Because of that when I tried to transfer it to The Master Genealogist it was a disaster. It has been years now and the database has been cleaned up and I can transfer it to other programs with no problem.
The biggest reason I would not recommend FTM is its reports. There is no way to edit them. The second is the text editor. I have played with Legacy and its reports are great. The program with the best text editor that I have tried is called Family Historian. It is a British company. My only nit pic with it is that it uses abbreviations for the months. I just have this thing about abbreviating the months.
Many will tout FTM's ability to sync with Ancestry. In my experience, this has been the source of a tremendous amount of frustration. When it fails and it will, you spend endless hours trying to fix the problems. Hours that could have been spent researching or working on your art.
I do use genealogy software but it is primarily for its charts. I don't store my images in the software. They are filed by location and record type on my E drive. For me, this makes the most sense. When I am working on a project either a case study or digital scrapbooking my genealogy I look for things based on what type of record I am looking for.
The other programs I use are Zotero, Tropy, Scrivener, and Word.
Both Zotero and Tropy are free programs. They were developed by Universities specifically for research. At this point, I use Zotero more than Tropy. In Zotero I can add a document or a book. If the book has been published it is one click and all the information is right there to create a citation. I can add any analysis in notes that are then attached to a book or document. I can have all my translations attached right to the document. These days when I am researching Zotero is open and all my research is added at the time. The search function in Zotero is one of the best I have used. Zotero also syncs online which I can access from anywhere. Zotero's add-on connector is a godsend. If website has added metadata all the data is added automatically to Zotero. Zotero will also read PDFs and index them if they have been OCRed. Plus you can view the PDF while in the program.
Tropy is a program specifically designed for research images of documents. However, because of some of its features, it works great for family photographs. You can take a group photo and identify every person in the photograph. You can add an unlimited amount of notes for each photograph and or person that you have identified. The downside to Tropy is that it does not sync online.
Scrivener is a writing program. I use it to write up my blog posts and other genealogy reports.
Most of my writing for my digital scrapbooking is done in Word documents. I find it works well and I can copy and paste the journalling directly to my pages.
