Installing the Ancestry.co.uk Enhanced Image Viewer application on Windows 7 (x64)

This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of weeks back, I started to investigate my family tree. Spurred on my a combination of recent personal events I switched the half-hearted attempt that I’d made at genesreunited.co.uk over to ancestry.co.uk and the 14 day trial was enough to convince me that it was a good tool for researching my family history.

Transferring my tree was easy enough – there is a de facto file format used by genealogists called GEDCOM and both sites supported it, but as I got stuck into researching the tree I found that I was having difficulty installing the Enhanced Image Viewer ActiveX control that Ancestry uses to display certain documents. To be fair to Ancestry, I run Windows 7 (not yet generally available) – but they only officially support IE7 (IE8 has been around for a while yet) and push people towards Firefox if they are having problems. Firefox is OK, but installing a new browser just to access one feature on a website is also a little extreme. I was sure there was a way… and eventually (with Ancestry’s help), I got there.

My problem was that (using 32-bit Internet Explorer) I could access a page that wanted to load the Enhanced Image Viewer and I could download and run the installer; however setup failed stating that:

Setup failed – contact customer support

Windows then detected a problem with the installation but, following advice on the Ancestry website I told it that the installation was successful and it allows me to continue. After returning to Ancestry, I was presented with a message stating that:

The Enhanced Image Viewer is not installed on this machine. For the best experience, please click here to download the Enhanced Image Viewer or click here to view this image using the Basic Image Viewer.

The Basic Image Viewer seems to work OK but the very existence of an “enhanced” viewer suggests that there is something there that I’m missing (and this is a subscription website after all)!

So, here’s what I tried that didn’t work:

  1. Enabling the ActiveX control using Internet Explorer to manage add-ins (it wasn’t there to enable).
  2. Manually downloading and installing the Enhanced Image viewer (failed to register).
  3. Manually uninstalling the Enhanced Viewer (it was not there as it never successfully installed).

In the end, I broke all good security practices by logging on as administrator (instead of running the installer as an administrator), and turning off UAC, after which the viewer installed as it should. Clearly this application was very badly developed (it seems not to follow any modern application development standards) but at least I got it installed!

One final word of warning – and this one is non-technical – researching your family tree can quickly become addictive (my wife refers to it as my latest “time Hoover”).

4 thoughts on “Installing the Ancestry.co.uk Enhanced Image Viewer application on Windows 7 (x64)

  1. I have been tracing my own family history for some time copying my public library research onto a memory stick and adding to my file at home without any problems. My latest images would not open and the need for a free download of Ancestry,s Enhanced Image Viewer was recommended. Unfortunately the download did,nt work despite screen assurance that the download had been succesful. I did see a cure for the situation but I fear beyond my limited experience.
    Any help would be appreciated
    Thank you

  2. Whats happened to this site? I used it a year ago with ease, I now have windows 7 – would this be the problem. can someone tell me on the £6.95 pay as you go deal – i eventually got to the 1901 census – with a line of 4 people i was interested in, living in a numbered household etc and I KNEW ALL THIS TO START WITH- what i really wanted to see was WHERE THEY LIVED, THEIR occupation etc. i WAS CONFUSED WITH ALL those ADD ONS – THEY CERTAINLY NEVER USED TO HAVE ALL THIS LAST YEAR -was it a downlaod problem, a windows 7 problem or an Ancestry problem ANY HELP – JEAN -SENIOR CITIZEN

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