Orkney Image Library

The Orkneycommunities Facebook page is now being updated automatically when new pictures are approved here, and when new News articles are published on the Orkneycommunities home page. What's not to Like?

The big pictures are on the way back. The ability to add big pictures was lost during some changes to the system earlier this year, as was the ability to view big versions of pictures that had been uploaded. The latter function has been restored, and in a way that should reduce our bandwidth requirements when checking for big versions, but for the time being you'll see a 'Check for big picture' link with each picture where the status of whether a big picture exists or not has not been checked. It's a crowdsourcing thing, like associating pictures with an area.

The ability to add new big pictures should be along again soon too, I hope, with a chunk of retrospective adding. If there are any particular big pictures you fancy, drop me a line at contact@orkneycommunities.co.uk.

Also... Note the embryonic 'Previous/Next' function on pictures, by popular request. This will take a bit of debugging, due to the different ways you can arrive at a picture viz. by chronology, area, contributor, group, album, random...

It turned out the image garbling (as we say in the trade) was due to new anti-spam software installed by Calico, our hosts. They have rolled this back and the pictures have been reconstituted. Hurray!

The time has come to take stock and hopefully improve things on Orkneycommunities and the Orkney Image Library. I still bear the scars from last time, but I hope you will have mellowed with time and agree that the teething problems were generally sorted out, and suggestions taken on board. And who can deny that the Big Picture facility is an improvement?

Anyway, changes proposed are not radical (at present). I'm keen to get the search facility greatly improved, and maybe introduce other ways of displaying search results. Any suggestions for that, and for anything else, gratefully received.

Cheers
Steven