As our collection of historical photos grows it will become more difficult to find the particular photos that you are interested in. To help with searching, a subject classification system has been devised. The subject classifications are

• Title

• Place

• Category 1 (cat1)

• Category 2 (cat2)

• Year

• Copyright

For place, cat1, cat2, and copyright you can display a list of choices by clicking on the small black triangle to the right hand side of the text box. You can choose a phrase from a drop-down menu. This shows the result of clicking the 'Place' button.

TITLE: You may enter a phrase that you expect to see in the photo title. So if the photo title was

Barn dance at Spennithorne 1953

then you could type 'Free Text' phrases such as 'spennithorne' or 'barn' or 'dance' or '1953' and a photo with your phrase in the title would be displayed. But other photos having the same phrase in the title would be also displayed. The other disadvantage of a Free Text search is that the searcher can only enter one phrase. Nor can you enter 'spennithorne barn dance' because this precise phrase is not in the title.

PLACE:

You can select one place from the drop-down menu to look for.

OWNER/COPYRIGHT HOLDER:

This is search method just like 'Place'.

CAT1 and CAT2:

Photos have been assigned subject categories. Cat1 is a general category, Cat2 is more specific. So a photo showing a military tank has a Cat1 of 'Transport' and a Cat2 of 'Tank'. A photo showing agricultural labourers leading hay would have a Cat1 of 'Farming' and a Cat2 of 'Haymaking'. Setting up a search with a Cat1 of 'Farming' will produce all the 'Farming-in-general' photos but a search with a Cat2 of 'Haymaking' will produce only the haymaking photos.

Setting up subject classifications is notoriously difficult and is prone to making arbitrary decisions on 'border-line' photos. But it is at least an attempt to guide the searcher. The classifications will become more clear by inspection of the following table. Please bear in mind that new classifications will be assigned as the collection grows.

YEAR:

It can be difficult to be precise about the year of a photo. So all years are approximations. If, in the year text box, you enter '1980' you will retrieve photos with the approximate year of 1980. If you enter in the year text box '195', you will retrieve all photos from 1950 to 1959.

'AND'/'OR' SEARCHES:

You can enter ONE or SEVERAL search phrases.
Entering Place=leyburn, Cat1=social event and Year=1965 will display those photos (if any) which have these classifications. We can imagine writing AND between these three classification - 'leyburn' AND 'social event' AND '1965'. This need not concern you because this 'AND logical' is the default method of carrying out a search. But exceptionally you may want to identify photos using 'OR' classifications. To do this click the OR 'radiobutton'. You can now, for example, identify photos with the classifications 'Leyburn' OR 'Social event' OR '1965'.

THE SEARCH BUTTON:

When you have entered classifications in the text boxes, press the Search button and you will see a display of matches - as photo 'thumbnails'.  If you click the Search button WITHOUT entering any search classifications, all the photos will be displayed as thumbnails (you might have to wait for a few seconds).

THE THUMBNAIL LIST:

Each entry in the thumbnail List of photographs consists of the title, an '(E)' if the photograph was displayed in the Exhibition, and the owner/copyright owner of the photograph.
If you click on the thumbnail photo, a larger version of the photograph is displayed.

Click on a thumbnail to see a larger display. At the larger display you can click on left or right pointing triangular icons to 'step through' all the photos irrespective of classification.

A 'TOTAL' SEARCH:

If you do not type in any search information and press the Search button, ALL the photographs in the database are displayed in the List