Some technical notes

Our aim is to preserve early photos of Harby for people to enjoy a hundred years from now.

In 2008 a small working group began to put digital copies of early photos of the village onto the web. All details that can be found about each photo are recorded with a minimum of where and when it was taken and the names of any people in it. These pictures of Harby in the past go with the wealth of written records already available, the census returns, trade directories, parish records, maps etc. The vision is that people doing their own family history anywhere in the world will be able to find pictures of their Harby ancestors and where they lived to go with the written records.

The images are scanned in at settings to ensure that all details are preserved:- 300 dpi, saved in TIFF, to A4 size. This gives an image around 8,000 kb. The condition of a photo is part of its story. Some photos carry the solemnity of an occasion, coming from a professional camera, printed at a large size, and preserved in an ornate album. Others come from a small inexpensive camera and have captured the moment in a snapshot. They may have been well thumbed and be creased and stained from the number of times they have been looked at.

The digital copy is always kept of the photo in its original condition and it may be this which goes onto the website. Sometimes the print is in such poor condition that it is difficult to see the picture; in these cases the picture editing programme on the computer has been used to remove creases, dust or scratches etc. Where the original has been edited in this way it is recorded in the caption on the website.

To go onto the web each image is altered to JPEG format after any editing with the width set at 800 pixels and the resolution about 200 kb.

We are immensely grateful to the people of Harby who own these photographs for sharing them with, we can say, the rest of the whole world on this website. If  the owner of a photograph wishes it a digital copy has been lodged with Leicestershire Record Office to ensure safe keeping for the future.

We are also grateful to the staff of the Record Office for discussions over the best practice to use in our project.