I apologise for the awkward title name, I struggled to word it better in my head.

Anyway! I've recently gotten into the whole idea of a legacy and families with many generations, but in my own way rather than following challenge rules. I've seen the odd image here and there where people "document" their legacy families by taking specific pictures with the in-game cameras and framing them on the walls.

For example, one I saw was a medium framed picture of the parents/couple in the center and small pictures of their children as they grew around this medium framed picture. I thought it was adorable! And it got me curious, how do other legacy family players do things like this in their games? I used to make paintings of the "heir" or each Sim at a certain age in TS2 in a way to document my legacy families in the legacy home. I'm looking for a cool way to do it myself in TS4, so I thought I'd ask here!

Well, I tried to keep a text document outside of the game after there were some bugs messing up certain sims' family lines--sometimes the parents would be erased from that particular sim's history despite them showing up on their brothers'/sisters' family tree properly. What can ya do--but I gave up after around 30 sims and thankfully the bug mostly went away.

THEN I tried doing that thing you mentioned, framing in-game pictures, which was pretty cool actually but was too much work to mess with and I only have like two on the walls. But they still look cool.

Mostly I just do it all in my head and hope the game doesn't do something stupid again. Right now one of the sim's fathers has disappeared from his history even though his sisters have him perfectly fine in theirs. I don't want to blame EA because I do play with a bunch of handy mods and I also play the game in a very...unique way that might mess with family trees, so it's not a big deal. Like I said, in my head I still know who's who, for the most part.

IMO this is probably one of the best ways to play TS4. If you jump around too much and make too many new sims/families you won't have that attachment to them that keeps you coming back. At least that's how it was in my case, and that's how I ended up with a family of 75 sims (72 living). And ya know what's really crazy, unlike the previous games I can actually recognize, name and mostly remember all 72 of them, except for the babies. I could never do that in the previous games, aside from the "favorites." For everything TS4 does wrong it does manage to do at least one or two things right, and it's good to see other people enjoying the game for what it is.

I'm the opposite of Shenti, I get bored with playing just one family and need to get attached to a uge web of shared history, feuds and alliances in my sims worlds instead. I also find my sims' lives burn out too quickly if I stay with only one household. In a rotational save everyone is around longer, because even when I do not play them, they appear in everyone else's lives as visitors, passerbys etc.
That's why my legacies never last long before the families get transfered into my rotational save.

Mostly I document outside the game with "Ahnenblatt", a freeware genealogy program or the online "The Plum Tree" app that was written specifically with Sims 4 in mind. But I also have my sims write a family chronicle where each generation adds a new chapter in form of a new book.

I use a website to keep track of everything, it's one of the first things you get when you google online family tree log.

But I actually use MSPaint to go more in depth, it might be lame but it's free and i do what I want, so it works.

I document my legacies on blogs, and I use The Plum Tree for their family trees. On one, I had tried keeping a "Who's Who?" tab with a pic and all their information, plus made-up "fun facts" for the different characters, but when photobucket broke it all to hell, I gave up on that. In game, I tend to use the camera functions to document it "for" the family itself. In one family, every generation's couple takes a couple photo together in the big photo backdrop thingy that came with GTW and they're all hung in the foyer. In another family, each child gets a picture of them as a child/teen/adult, and the adult pic and their spouse's adult pic go on a certain wall. This is again done with the photo setup from GTW. The extra child pics and such eventually get relegated to the basement, but it's nice to have them. In another family that is all aliens, I have every baby born at the hospital and all the alien birth certificates are up on a wall together along with the founder's medical degree (a career reward from the doc career).

I use family tree for documenting legacies and I take frequent pictures as the current generation grows. I haven't gotten far in any legacies in sims 4 but in sims 3 I had two 6 generations legacies that I enjoyed.

I document like crazy in pics and excel sheets. I do family trees, checklists, memorable story items each generation, take an official pic of each Sim, etc., etc., etc.

I documented my 34 generation family in 3. I document so much it is ridiculous. :D