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Explorers Photos

Anyone into photography will no doubt relish the chance to get out into some scenery with a camera, and club members are welcome to share Explorers photos in the gallery. You retain copyright of any pictures you decide to send. Unfortunately, because the university resolutely refuses to allow PHP or CGI programs to run on the main web server (too much of a security risk, apparently), you'll have to do it manually.

We can't promise to display every photo, and we may have to resize some if the files are too large. (If you'd prefer to skip the rest of this, the email address is at the bottom!)

1. Select pictures

Apart from the camera and batteries, it doesn't cost anything to take digital photos. But selecting pictures carefully will add value to an album, so it's usually worth choosing the best out of the hundreds you may end up taking! (There's lots of advice on taking good pictures at the BBC's Digital Picture of Britain website.)

2. Copy and resize

Often it's not worth sending images larger than about 1-megapixel by email, which can really clog things up. (With its origins in the dim and distant past, email was never designed to share pictures.) Before sending anything, consider resizing copies of your photos (but keep the originals safe!) to something like 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600 pixels, which is the size of most of our existing gallery photos.

There are literally hundreds of programs that'll resize pictures for you; any commercial graphics software like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or Corel Photo Paint will do the job. If you're using Windows XP you might want to consider the Image Resizer Powertoy, free from Microsoft (allows you to resize one or many image files with a right-click), or Photo Resize Magic for any version of Windows, also free. Most platforms (Linux, Unix, Mac OS, Windows) can use the GNU Image Manipulation Program (aka 'The GIMP'), which is very powerful and (naturally) free.

If you're unable to resize your pictures you can still send them over, but you may have to send each individually (see last point).

3. Picture captions (optional)

It's up to you if you want to give pictures a title, but it's often more amusing and/or useful to do so! You can either change the filename itself (e.g. 26_view_from_tryfan.jpg – please avoid spaces if you do this!) or write a list of files and titles, separated by double hyphens:

<filename>--<picture title>

for example:

  ...
IMG_3124.jpg--Group at Janet's Foss
IMG_3128.jpg--Gordale Scar
  ...

(Untitled pictures will just use the filename as a title, which is rarely as interesting.)

Techie time: A quick way to list all JPEG files in a directory... (see footnote)

4. Send to website@explorersclub.co.uk!

Keep emails below a couple of megabytes if possible, otherwise the university mail server may have difficulties and your message could disappear into a black hole! If you have to send large files, please do so one at a time, or consider using FLUFF.

If you'd prefer to lend us a rewritable CD or USB disk instead, then that is also fine.

Footnote: How to list all *.jpg files in a directory

Under Windows:

  • Open a command prompt (click 'Start', 'Run', and type cmd).
  • Change directory to the folder containing photos (cd "<pathname>").
  • Type dir /B *.jpg > names.txt to list the names into a new file called 'names.txt', which you can then edit with Notepad.

Under Linux/UNIX:

  • Open a terminal.
  • Change directory to the folder containing photos (cd "<pathname>").
  • Type ls -1 *.jpg > names.txt to list the names into a new file called 'names.txt', which can be edited with emacs (for example).
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