The GEDCOM 5.5 standard supports multimedia files of all types. Currently phpGedView supports multimedia objects only as external files. Multimedia embedded in the GEDCOM file itself will be ignored.

There are three ways to add media items to your Gedcom so that they can be used by PhpGedView. The first way is to add them in the genealogy application you used to export your Gedcom, such as PAF. Then when you export the Gedcom, the file links will automatically be included. Some genealogy applications such as Family Tree Maker do not properly export the file links.
The second way to get media items in your Gedcom, is to add them online using PhpGedView's online editing capabilities. Note that if you use this method, and then update your data in your original genealogy application, you will lose your changes if you upload your gedcom again.
The third option is to use the Add Media Tool during the validate gedcom stage. This tool requires that you use the MySQL installation of PGV and keeps a seperate table of media items that are added to your gedcom before you import it. This tool allows you to keep a list of media items seperate from your gedcom file so that you can update your gedcom file offline without having to duplicate your work everytime you update your gedcom file.

To use the multimedia support in phpGedView you must copy the multimedia files external to your GEDCOM to the "media" directory in the folder where you installed phpGedView.

You can find all of the images referenced in your file by opening your gedcom in a text editor and looking for the OBJE or FILE tags.

PhpGedView includes a "media/thumbs" directory where you may place thumbnails of your media files for display in lists and on other pages. PhpGedView allows you to create your own thumbnails so that you can maintain artistic control over your media and to avoid the installation of other server side software. Make a copy your images and  reduce them to an appropriate thumbnail size somewhere around 100px width and upload them to the "media/thumbs" directory. Keep the filename the same as the original.

Once you have your media prepared and thumbnails created, you can upload them to the media directory using your favorite FTP program, or you may upload them from the Admin->Upload Media page.

As of version 2.0 you can configure PhpGedView to recognize subdirectories in your media folder. The subdirectories must be the same names as the subdirectories in your media file paths pointed to in your GEDCOM file. For example if you have the following media references in your GEDCOM file:
C:\Pictures\Genealogy\photo.jpg
C:\Pictures\Scans\scan1.jpg
scan2.jpg

With the media depth set to 1 you need to set up your directory structure like this:
media/Genealogy/photo.jpg
media/Scans/scan1.jpg
media/scan2.jpg
media/thumbs/Genealogy/photo.jpg
media/thumbs/Scans/scan1.jpg
media/thumbs/scan2.jpg

With the media depth set to 2 you need to set up your directory structure like this:
media/Pictures/Genealogy/photo.jpg
media/Pictures/Scans/scan1.jpg
media/scan2.jpg
media/thumbs/Pictures/Genealogy/photo.jpg
media/thumbs/Pictures/Scans/scan1.jpg
media/thumbs/scan2.jpg