Guidelines for Contributing Photographs

   Contributed photographs can fall under three categories:  People, Places, and Gravestones.

If you contribute any photographs of ancestors within your own family line, I would encourage you to seek your family's permission for me to post such photos on SouthRonaldsay.net.  To honor family privacy, I wish to only post images of non-living ancestors, and especially images of those who lived more than 100 years ago.  I do not wish to post photographs of ancestors who have died as recently as in the last 80 years or so.  My focus for this web site lies particularly in records and photographs portraying 19th-century material, and, hence, early photos or artist's representations of ancestors are of great interest to family members, researchers and other visitors to this web site.  As it relates to the "People" photographs, my aim for the photo page(s) was to try to dig up photographs of ancestors that are OLD, ca.1800s -- this may be a difficult goal, as many old photographs have not survived through the years, and some may even be too delicate for a family member to digitize for the web... but with the focus of my site being on 19th-century records, I was hoping that any "People" pictures, specifically, could be ones that date approximately to PRE-1920 or thereabouts.  Please clearly identify for me by name any or all of the ancestors shown within your photograph, the year the photo was taken, and also the location, so that I may try to write an appropriate caption for your image.

Landscape photographs of South Ronaldsay, Burray, or Swona, or the Pentland Skerries, or photographs of any farms or houses existing on South Ronaldsay, Burray, Swona, or the Pentland Skerries which were also indicated either in the South Ronaldsay, Burray, Swona and Pentland Skerries 1821 Census or in any other 19th-century records, are welcomed.  "Places" photographs could probably portray any time period (although more current pictures may bring up privacy issues, and I would hope  --though this may not always occur--  to get permission from current property owners before posting a current image of a place).  Please be sure of the accuracy of the placenames of the houses or farms shown in your photographs before you submit them to me.  Site visitors should be made aware that I myself was not born on South Ronaldsay, and so I may not be able to absolutely verify the placenames provided by contributors for their photos - if any site visitors find any names attributed to placenames in photos which you believe are incorrect, please let both the pertinent contributor and me know via email, if possible.

If you wish to contribute one or more photographs of South Ronaldsay or Burray gravestones, I would like to display only photographs that show gravestones portraying deaths which occurred during the 1800's or earlier.  I do not feel comfortable showing any gravestones for people who have died more recently (e.g. in the 20th- or 21st-centuries) as I would like to respect the family's privacy.  Again, my focus for SouthRonaldsay.net lies particularly in portraying records, transcripts, and photographs of 19th-century material.  Occasionally, however, a gravestone may depict the death information of several family members, and may therefore show a death which was post-1900.  I will try to use my judgement, and your approval, in a case like this, and I may consider posting this type of gravestone if most of the other deaths shown on the stone occurrred in the 19th-century.

   Please send me photographs that apply only to the family history of Orcadians who were originally connected with South Ronaldsay, Burray, Swona or the Pentland Skerries.  They may be photographs of gravestones of ancestors who were eventually buried in Australia or Canada, for example, but they must have had their roots in South Ronaldsay, Burray, Swona or the Pentland Skerries for me to consider posting the images.
For any photos you contribute, I reserve the right to post the images of my choice, in accordance with how I view their appropriateness to SouthRonaldsay.net.

   My preference is for photographs that were either taken by you, or  --if they are photographs of ancestors within your own family line--  photographs for which you have your family's permission for me to post on SouthRonaldsay.net.  The person giving me the permission to post the image on-line would be the one I would want indicated in the copyright notice.

   Along with the copyright notice I will post with your photograph(s), please let me include your applicable current email address so that any site visitors who may wish to contact your family or you regarding possible image use, may do so.

   Included with the copyright notice for your photograph will be either the year you took the photograph, the year I posted the photograph on SouthRonaldsay.net, or both of these years inclusive... you can decide.

   Send your photos in .JPG format.  Images in TIFF format will also be accepted, but will be converted to .JPGs when put onto the web.

   The higher the quality and resolution of the scanned photograph you send to me, the better will be the image I can post on-line.  If you have your original quality scan sent to me at a higher resolution and/or in a larger size, I will have an opportunity to use that larger size on SouthRonaldsay.net, plus have the option of making an additional medium-sized image from the original.  Sometimes it is helpful for site visitors to have a medium-sized image to view initially, with the option of viewing a "super-sized" image as well, in order to better decipher the sometimes difficult-to-read inscriptions on the surfaces of the old gravestones.
However, please do not excede 400-600k per image, or have an image width of more than 1024 pixels.  The average width in pixels of images I will tend to post on this web site will be 600-700 pixels.

   Be aware that I will be making one filename change to your image in order to better organize the photos on my end, as I build this portion of the web site.
As a general rule, the filename format will be changed to:
        " sr-[your initials]~[a number].JPG ",  where "sr" stands for South Ronaldsay.

    Contributing your images to SouthRonaldsay.net can either be a temporary or somewhat more permanent way to display your family's images.  If you ever obtain your own home page, and later decide to have your photos displayed only on your own web site, instead of being displayed at SouthRonaldsay.net, I will gladly remove your contributed photographs from SouthRonaldsay.net at your request.  Please note that there is also a section on my Links Page for South Ronaldsay-related family web sites, if you would like me to link to your web site from SouthRonaldsay.net.

Contact me for more information regarding how you might
send your images to me for consideration.