Migrating from Genial PedigreeDraw: a practical guide for clinical teams

Short version. Genial PedigreeDraw was a respectable cloud clinical pedigree tool from Genial Genetic Solutions / Rainbow Scientific with NSGC-compliant symbols, multi-user collaboration, and GEDCOM import/export, priced at around ten pounds per user per month after a sixty-day free trial. It was discontinued in May 2020. That leaves a long tail of clinical services with historical Genial pedigrees — some as GEDCOM exports, many as PDF prints or PNG screenshots, and some still trapped behind expired accounts. This guide explains what to rescue while you still can, how to migrate via GEDCOM or image OCR, how to rebuild free-text disease annotations in a structured modern system, and how to choose between contemporary replacements. Evagene is one option and the one we are best placed to describe in detail; we also summarise Phenotips, Progeny, FamGenix, and TrakGene as points of comparison.

If you are reading this and your service is still actively using Genial in 2026 — we occasionally hear from clinics that kept a locally-cached instance running — please treat this as urgent. The software is unmaintained, has no clinical support, and should not be used for live patient care.

What Genial PedigreeDraw was

Genial PedigreeDraw was a cloud-based clinical pedigree drawing tool developed by Genial Genetic Solutions in collaboration with Rainbow Scientific. It targeted clinical genetics services that needed standards-compliant pedigrees, GEDCOM interchange, and multi-user access without on-premise installation. Its published features included NSGC-compliant pedigree symbols, multi-user collaboration, and GEDCOM import and export. Pricing was roughly ten pounds per user per month after a sixty-day free trial. It was a sensible, mid-market tool that did its job competently for a number of years before the vendor withdrew the service in May 2020. Historical users generally speak of it warmly; it was not discontinued because it was bad software.

The consequence of that discontinuation, though, is that clinical services that built up years of pedigree work inside Genial were left with three problems at once: the live application gone, the cloud store no longer accessible after grace periods expired, and any local exports (if they exist at all) in whatever format the user happened to choose at the time. In the worst cases, services have little more than printed PDFs in a paper file or PNGs in a network folder. In the best cases, they have GEDCOM archives that were exported before the shutdown.

What to export from Genial before you lose access (if you still can)

If by some chance you still have any access to a Genial instance, archived account, or local cache that can be revived, the priority order for export is this:

1. GEDCOM 5.5.1 export for every pedigree. GEDCOM is the universal interchange format for genealogical and pedigree data. Every modern clinical pedigree tool — Evagene, Phenotips, Progeny, FamGenix, TrakGene — can ingest GEDCOM. Even if you do not decide on your replacement tool yet, a folder of GEDCOMs gives you options.
2. Rendered image export (SVG if available, else PDF or PNG) for every pedigree. GEDCOM captures structure; the rendered image captures the layout, any annotations, and the clinical interpretation of what was on screen. Both matter. Keep both.
3. Any associated clinical notes, free-text annotations, or case-level metadata. If Genial exposed a CSV or JSON dump of case records alongside the pedigree, take it. If it only exposed a printable view, save that as PDF. If you can copy-and-paste case notes out, do so — each case should have its free-text clinical context retained somewhere searchable.
4. A local copy of the proband identifiers. In the worst case, you will need to reconcile Genial files against your EHR. A spreadsheet of "patient ID in Genial, pedigree filename, date drawn, drawn by" is a small artefact that saves significant time later.

Treat this as an archival exercise with a deadline: assume access can disappear at any time. If you already have no access at all — and for most services reading this in 2026 that is the honest starting point — skip to the "What if you only have printouts" section further down.

Why GEDCOM 5.5.1 is the universal bridge

GEDCOM 5.5.1 is the de facto standard for exchanging pedigree structure between tools. It was designed for genealogy originally — which is why it carries fields like birth place and marriage date gracefully — but its individual/family graph maps cleanly onto clinical pedigree structure: individuals, sex, parent-offspring relationships, partnerships, twins. It does not carry rich clinical annotations well (no built-in ICD-10, OMIM, HPO, or MONDO slots), which is the main reason clinical pedigree data typically requires two-stage migration: GEDCOM for the structure, then manual re-entry or a separate import for the disease annotations.

Evagene imports GEDCOM 5.5.1 directly. So do Phenotips, Progeny, FamGenix, and most other serious clinical pedigree tools. If you have a GEDCOM folder from Genial, you are not stranded. Our guide to GEDCOM pedigree software goes deeper into what GEDCOM carries and what it does not, and which tools handle the edge cases (twin zygosity, adoption, donor conception) cleanly.

What if you only have printouts or images

This is the common case for services that lost access to Genial before remembering to export. Maybe your records are PDF printouts in a paper file. Maybe they are PNGs in a shared folder. Maybe they are photocopies of consultation notes with a hand-annotated pedigree in the margin. The escape hatch is pedigree image OCR.

Evagene supports pedigree image OCR import: upload a PNG, JPG, SVG, or PDF, and the tool reconstructs the structural pedigree automatically — individuals with inferred sex, parent-offspring links, partnerships, and visible affected status. It is not perfect; you will review the reconstruction and fix any ambiguities (e.g. when the image does not make clear which partner is affected, or when deceased status is coded with a slash you need to confirm). For a large archive, working through a few per day in the clinic's quiet hours is tractable. Disease annotations that were visible as free text in the image are picked up in the OCR text layer; they are then assigned to individuals and mapped to structured ICD-10 / OMIM codes in Evagene's 200+ disease catalogue.

The practical recommendation is to treat OCR as the second-best migration route, after GEDCOM. Where you have a choice, prefer GEDCOM. Where you don't, OCR is the route that stops your historical pedigrees being effectively lost.

Rebuilding disease annotations

Genial's disease annotations were typically free-text — a clinician would type a condition name next to an individual, with variable punctuation and abbreviation. That works fine for a single user who knows the conventions they themselves used; it becomes a problem when the data needs to migrate, because there is no machine-readable link between the label and a structured code.

The modern approach is to move those labels onto ICD-10 and OMIM codes during migration. Evagene's 200+ disease catalogue covers most conditions a clinical genetics service annotates routinely; selecting the matching catalogue entry takes a few seconds per individual once a clinician has the Genial label in view. For unusual conditions not in the catalogue, Evagene supports free-text additions with an optional OMIM number for traceability. A clinician working from a GEDCOM + PDF pair (structure from one, labels from the other) can typically annotate a family of ten to fifteen individuals in under five minutes.

For very large archives — hundreds or thousands of cases — it is worth sampling. Start by migrating the twenty most-active cases in detail as a pilot; the knowledge you gain there (which Genial abbreviations map to which catalogue entries, what your house rule is for ambiguous labels, how to record deceased status and age of diagnosis) then scales across the rest of the archive. Keep a small mapping document — "ALK label 'LS' → OMIM 120435 Lynch syndrome, Amsterdam II positive" — as part of your migration audit trail.

Comparison: Genial (historic) vs modern options

For services choosing where to migrate, the table below summarises Genial's historic feature set against contemporary options. We include Evagene — the platform we build — and four other serious options: Phenotips, Progeny, FamGenix, and TrakGene. This is a high-level comparison; each column links to a more detailed comparison page where you can go deeper. The point here is to help you shortlist.

Historic Genial feature summary compiled from public material prior to May 2020. Modern tools summarised from current public product pages as of April 2026. "—" indicates the capability is not publicly advertised; "partial" indicates limited or conditional support.

How Evagene specifically supports Genial-style workflows

Evagene is one of several modern options. The reason we can describe it in detail is that we build it, and this guide is hosted on evagene.com. For services that used Genial primarily because it was a browser-based, NSGC-compliant, collaborative, GEDCOM-friendly cloud tool at a sensible price, Evagene is a straightforward continuation of that shape: browser-based, NSGC/ISCN notation, multi-user, GEDCOM in and out, currently free in Alpha.

Beyond the Genial-comparable baseline, Evagene adds the platform capabilities a 2026 clinical service typically needs: validated BayesMendel risk models (BRCAPRO, MMRpro, PancPRO), Mendelian AD/AR/XR calculators for monogenic non-cancer conditions, AI-powered clinical interpretation using bring-your-own-key LLMs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, Fernet-encrypted), Analysis Templates for codifying house reporting style, a REST API with scoped evg_ keys, webhooks (HMAC-SHA256 signed), an MCP server exposing 11 pedigree tools to Claude Desktop and Claude Code, an embeddable pedigree viewer, karyogram viewer, consanguinity detection, batch risk screening, and four report types. Data portability is substantial — GEDCOM 5.5.1 in and out, JSON in and out, 23andMe imports, pedigree image OCR, and PNG/SVG/PDF exports — so you are not locked in if your needs later change.

For the migration itself, Evagene's GEDCOM import and pedigree image OCR handle the two realistic Genial data shapes. If you have GEDCOMs, upload them; Evagene reconstructs the family structure, and you annotate diseases from the 200+ catalogue. If you have only PDFs or PNGs, upload those; Evagene's OCR reconstructs structure from the image, you verify, then annotate. For large archives, a short Python or shell script can batch through folders of files against Evagene's REST API — we are happy to help draft something for your specific archive shape.

Migration path: a concrete recipe

For a typical Genial migration to Evagene, the recipe looks like this.

1. Inventory your historical archive. Count pedigrees. Classify by available export (GEDCOM / image / printout-only). Identify high-value cases (active families in ongoing care, families with recent risk assessments, Amsterdam II Lynch cases, complex consanguineous families).
2. Set up Evagene access. Join the Alpha waiting list at evagene.com. For a pilot, a single clinician account is enough.
3. Pilot with 10-20 high-value cases. Migrate these in detail: import GEDCOM or image, reconstruct structure, annotate diseases from the 200+ catalogue, record migration provenance in Evagene's notes (source file, date, person migrating). Verify against original clinical notes or current patient records.
4. Refine your migration playbook. Document your conventions for Genial free-text abbreviations, your house rule for ambiguous cases, and your sampling strategy for audit.
5. Batch the rest. For GEDCOM archives, use Evagene's REST API to batch-upload; for image archives, use the OCR import in batches. Track progress in a spreadsheet.
6. Audit sample. Pick a random 10 per cent of migrated cases. Have a second clinician verify structure and annotations against the source. Fix systematic issues if the audit reveals them.
7. Keep the originals. The Genial GEDCOMs or images remain your source-of-truth historical archive. Do not delete them. Store in your normal clinical archive alongside the new Evagene case records.

Frequently asked questions

Related comparisons and reading

• Phenotips vs Evagene
• Progeny vs Evagene
• FamGenix vs Evagene
• TrakGene vs Evagene
• GEDCOM pedigree software
• Clinical genetics pedigree tools