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!

I'm often asked about how to improve or resize scanned pictures, and can now offer the following advice that anyone can try, as the software to do it is freely available online, and doesn't require anything to be installed.

If you haven't edited a picture before try this yourself and have a bit of fun. The following example looks at how to brighten up a faded picture.

This is the kind of thing you would do in Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro, or Photo Plus etc. but many people do not have this on their computers, and the programs are rather daunting at first anyway. However, there is an excellent online photo and picture editing package called Pixlr, available at http://www.pixlr.com which is just the trick, and can can do picture resizing, cropping and a huge range of editing functions, and also handily has an express version which is far easier to use and can cover the basics very well.

To edit your picture-
1) Visit the link I've just given, and select Pixlr Express.
2) You'll be prompted to 'Open Image From Computer', so click that button and browse for the picture you want to edit on your computer. It will then open in Pixlr.
3) Select 'Adjustments' from the options on the left, which will expand to show what adjustments you can make.
4) 'Brightness and Contrast' are what you are after, so whap up the contrast a bit, then increase the brightness a bit to get something with an appropriate balance.
5) Experiment.
6) When you are happy with the picture click 'Apply' then the 'Done' button at the bottom.
7) You'll be prompted to click 'Save' - do that, BUT SAVE WITH A DIFFERENT FILENAME OR YOU WILL OVERWRITE YOUR ORIGINAL. Work with a copy of the image from the start if this is a concern.
8) Bob's your uncle.

A whole new world of interesting activity has now been opened...!

Cheers,
Steven