At Wessex Archaeology, we’ve been working hard to build up a photo gallery which shows some of our most interesting projects and finds. We are pleased to announce that we now have over 200 photos online, with many more on the way. You can see them on the gallery section of our website.

The gallery has always been one of the most visited parts of our website. Thousands of people look at it each week, and we know from their comments that people love to see what life is like on an excavation, and to look at pictures of what has been dug up. In the light of its popularity, we have taken a different approach to a ‘traditional’ gallery.

Tags

We attach keywords or ‘tags’ to each of our photos. This helps us organise photos and helps you find more photos similar to the ones you have found interesting. In the example below, clicking on “excavation” will take you to a list of other photos of people doing just that, excavating!

Or you can see a “tag cloud” and explore our photos by associated words, just for fun!

Flickr

Our photos are hosted by Flickr, an online photographic sharing community, owned by Yahoo! Inc, whose aim is to “help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them”. The emphasis is also on the word community. People who use Flickr are able to comment on each other’s photos, ask questions and join special interest groups.

So, you can now get to our photos in two ways. You can browse them at leisure on our gallery, or you can view them on our Flickr homepage. If you’ve got a Flickr account (they’re free, although you’ll need to sign up for a free Yahoo! ID) you can comment on our photos and add us as a contact (and we’ll add you as one back!) to keep a track of when we upload new ones.

Keeping track: our Photos and RSS

RSS Feed Icon If you’ve never heard of RSS before, or have heard of it but want to know more, the BBC have a fantastic guide to what it is and how it can help you to keep up with the things you are interested in on the internet. Basically, it’s a way of ’subscribing’ (for free) to specific information on the internet to help ease the ever-growing tide of information.

Flickr offers RSS feeds for just about everything. You can subscribe to our photos in your favourite RSS reader with the link http://feeds.feedburner.com/WessexArchaeologyPhotos and you can even subscribe via RSS to photos about specific things, using the tags we attach to each image.

Enjoy!

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below.