Photo Archive Gallery Information

When you use any of the Photo Archive galleries you will be shown an array of thumbnail images of the full images that are in that gallery, presented approximately in year order.

If you hover your mouse pointer (or a touch-screen equivalent of this action – see the section below for further discussion) over any of the thumbnails, it will show you a Title (e.g. CD0095) and an explanatory Caption for that image (e.g. 1989: Alemouth Road looking W, Robbs at Tynedale Retail Park garden centre).

The caption is suffixed by a year, and galleries are organised in chronological order based on the year. For photos this is usually the year in which the photo was taken. Photos of items (e.g. a picture, map, postcard, copy of another photo) may use the year of the original. Postcards can be problematical in that the same picture may be used by different manufacturers at different times, or may have been dated from a postmark.

The years will be displayed using a number of formats, where NNNN represents a particular year (e.g. 1910):

1. NNNN: when we know the year.
2. cNNNN: circa, when we know the approximate year.
3. cNNNN?: question marks indicate that we’re not 100% sure of the year.
4. Pre-NNNN: this prefix indicated that the image must be before the indicated year.
5. Post-NNNN: this prefix indicates that the image must be after the indicated year.

If the original photo or slide that we have scanned displayed a processing date (usually a month and year), we have usually taken that as the date for the image.

If you click on any thumbnail image you will retrieve the full image. You can then move through the set of full images by using the arrow heads on the right- or left-hand side of the full image. If you want to return to the thumbnails images and captions, close the full image via the X in the top-right-hand corner. 

The Title information displayed over the thumbnail image may be used to search the full Catalogue in order to see any further information we may have about that image. For photos this information may include the month in which it was taken.

Building numbering can be problematical. Sometimes buildings are renumbered. Othertimes there can be an upstairs and a downstairs in one building, or a building has split into (say) two shop fronts. In the catalogue, building numbers have been taken from Northumberland County Council map. 

The majority of the images have been scanned from original postcards or slides at 300 dpi. Thus some images unavoidably show some pixellation effects, particularly at magnified level.

If you have any old photographs of Hexham and the surrounding area that you’d like to donate to the Archive, again please contact us. We would be delighted to hear from you.

Mouse Hover

To get a caption associated with a thumbnail image to show, the mouse cursor needs to be placed over the thumbnail image. This is straightforward on most computers with a separate mouse of tracking/pointing device – just use that device to position the mouse cursor over the thumbnail, and the caption will be displayed.

Touch-screen devices (e.g. mobile phones or tablets) don’t normally have a separate “mouse”, and instead use screen touches.  It can be difficult to avoid “clicking” on the thumbnail image, which brings up a full-sized image rather than just the caption. Mouse hover can be achieved by touching the thumbnail image lightly with a finger, dragging the finger slightly across the thumbnail image on the screen, and then removing the finger. If the first touch is static for too long, the system will interpret the touch as a click.