All the thumbnail photos can be viewed at a larger scale. The photos are taken on walks with the Penrith Ramblers and will probably be of most interest to Penrith Ramblers members. However, if you are not a member, have a look and see what you are missing.
Walks are regularly taken in areas within a reasonable travelling distance of Penrith, Cumbria. These areas include the Lake District, the Eden Valley, the Howgill Fells, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales and Southern Scotland. However, photos are not limited to these areas and may even have been taken on other continents, as some of our members go rambling as a party abroad.

With modern digital cameras, original photographs may be more than 10 megapixels in size. However, to reduce download times, the larger version of each photograph, with a normal landscape aspect ratio, that you can view on this site, measures 972 pixels wide by 729 pixels high and being in 'jpeg' format is adjusted to about 250 KB to 300KB in size - a trade-off of speed against quality. The height never exceeds 729 pixels whatever the aspect ratio and the width will not exceed 1050 pixels.

Earlier versions of this web site only allowed one set of photographs to be viewed as a slideshow, while older sets of photographs were placed on the 'Fotopic' website. A link to the 'Fotopic' website was provided so that the photos stored there could still be viewed.
Moving photos to the 'Fotopic' website was done to limit memory useage, a constraint made by the web host at the time. In 2011, 'Fotopic' ceased trading. However, with a new web host, allowing greater freedom on memory useage, it was possible, later in the year, to re-introduce the previous slideshows. These date from October 2007. Prior to this time, the site did not have a slideshow facility but did provide a facility to select a selection of thumbnail photos and view any enlargement in the selection by clicking on its thumbnail. This facility still exists. Unfortunately the photos which were shown during this period were not saved as sets and most of the accreditation is missing. However, all is not lost and new sets of photos have been re-created from copies stored on CD and hard disc. Inevitably the new sets will differ from the original ones and some members' photos during this period were not saved and will be missing, making these sets of photos even more biased to one contributor than before! It is hoped that the inclusion of these older sets of photos will be of interest, especially to those in the Penrith Ramblers at the time.

Some of the photos may appear twice on the website, appearing in this section and in the 'Walk Localities' area of the web site (e.g. 'The Lake District', 'The Eden Valley', etc.).

To Top

   Instructions for viewing photos.

1. Choose a set of photos. Roughly every four months a new set of photos has been placed on the website. (Those sets, placed on the site after September 2007 will show the date that they were first displayed.) Click on a set to bring up a page showing thumbnails of photos in the set.
   


2. Individual Photo Selection: Click on a (thumbnail) photo to get an enlarged view of that photo. You can select photos in any order. You should be able to use this method with a dial-up connection but with long download times you will need to be patient.


3. Slide show Mode, (Javascript (script in IE) must be enabled.)
   • Manual stepping mode.
     Hopefully the buttons are self-explanatory - if not:
     click on NEXT to view the next photo in the sequence, BACK to view the previous photo, >>| to jump to last photo in folder and |<< to jump to first photo in folder. Photos are displayed in the order that the thumbnails appear.
   • Autoplay mode.
     Click on Start Slide Show to view photos successively. The photos will change automatically.
     Click on Stop Slide Show to end autoplay.
     The default display time per photo is 12 seconds. Each time you click on Less Time the time decreases by about 1 second to a minimum of about 6 seconds and each time you click on More Time the time increases by about 1 second to a maximum of about 22 seconds.
     Manual operation is still effective during the slideshow except when the photo display is in the process of changing. Try again if nothing happens. To Top
   • Fade.(This can be applied in both manual or autoplay modes.)
     Click on 'USE FADE' to implement a facility to fade the images in and out during the slideshow.
     Click on 'CUT FADE' to remove it.
     This facility is browser dependent and is slow and uneven with Mozilla Firefox and may not work on older browsers. The fade time has been conservatively set to cope with slow computers but may still be too short for some. If you find that the picture stays blank, you will need to leave the web page and on returning use the slideshow without the fade selected.

! Slow downloads.

The slideshow is intended for those with internet connections of 1 M bits/second or more. All the enlarged photos are downloaded automatically in the background and, if you have a very fast connection, it is possible all of them could have been downloaded by the time you come to use the slideshow facility. However, because the speed of browsers using telephone lines depends on the distance from your exchange and will fall when traffic levels on the line are high, your download speed, though nominally above 1 M bits/second may fall well below it, if only temporarily. If this happens and an image fails to be downloaded in time, a red exclamation mark, ! , will be shown on the light green tool bar below the display and it is possible that the display will become disjointed. You now have 2 options.
1. Click on the More Time button several times allowing extra time between displayinging the photos.
2. Go to selecting photos manually, rather than using the slideshow. Start by clicking on the thumbnail of the last photograph that you viewed and then continue moving forward through them one at a time. allowing each photograph to download fully before moving on to the next.
Once the browser cache has been loaded with all the images, then they can then be viewed much more quickly and the slideshow facility should now work smoothly, even when the time intervals between each photo is shortened.

Members of the Penrith Group of Ramblers and their friends may submit photos for future inclusion. These should be at least 250 KB in size to give a picture with reasonable definition. Photos below this memory size may need to have their display-area reduced to compensate, sometimes leading to a group of 4 photos in a single display. No guarantee is given that every photo submitted will be put on the site and the webmaster reserves the right to crop and/or adjust the brightness/contrast of images to improve presentation.
When submitting a photograph by e-mail or CD, try to rename it with the subject of the picture and, if relevant, the leader and the date rather than leaving it with the number produced by the camera. You can do this using suitable photo software. Less convenient but better than nothing, is to include an accompanying text file with the photograph/s, linking the number on the photograph/s with the subject matter.To Top
If you have close-up shots of people's faces, please check that you have their permission to display the photograph. .
People may wonder why large panoramic pictures appear smaller than they expected. The reason is that the maximum width used is 1050 pixels and because the aspect ratio has to be kept constant, the height of the picture gets smaller, the wider the original picture is.
If you would like a copy of a photograph, before it was reduced in size, please contact the website manager, who may have an 'uncompacted' version of the photograph stored in memory. Alternatively he may be able to put you in touch with the person who initially supplied the photograph.
It is not intended to put new photos on the site in dribs and drabs but to introduce them as a new collection roughly midway between the placement of new walks' programmes.

To print out a colour photo. First switch on your colour printer. Having displayed the photo (see below), use your browser to select the 'Open image' facility. This should open a new window showing just the image. Then select 'Print'. This should bring up your printer dialogue box. Before selecting 'Print' again, make sure you have 'Print Preview' selected, so that you can cancel printing if necessary. Getting the 'Open image' facility may differ between browsers. For example, with the Opera browser, you need to right-click on the image. This opens a dialogue box, where you can select 'Open Image'. There is also a facility to 'Save image', which you might prefer to do first before printing, as this allows you to make adjustments to the photo using photo software. Another method is to use software, such as 'Gadwin Print Screen'. This allows you to select and copy part or all of an image to a prepared folder on your computer. You can then make adjustments, if needed, before storing or printing it out.

To Top

Corrupted Downloads.

Unfortunately Internet Explorer sometimes produces an incomplete download of a photograph, so that only an upper section of the photograph is visible. If you have this problem, more information can be obtained from the Site Management page.

It is intended that the set of photos should change about every 4 months. If they have not, try clicking REFRESH or RELOAD on your browser. (Depending on your browser, you may need to do this for each new set of photos on the screen.)