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File names should ideally be short but descriptive, and be composed of the following characters (excluding blanks):

0-9 A-Z a-z - + _ , .

Everything else can usually be handled as well but gets awkward or causes additional work.

Please upload your picture files in JPEG format. GIF and PNG files are also possible, but not recommended, as scanned photographs generally turn out larger in this format.

Picture files should not exceed 150 kB in size (some older pictures in the picture gallery which are larger than this notwithstanding). As an approximate rule of thumb, 1024 x 768 pixels is enough for a picture to be viewed on-screen (but less is also fine!). The compression feature of the JPEG file format (may be called differently by your software) can also be used to reduce file size without a loss of quality visible to the human eye.

Please include a short .txt file (in plain text format) for every picture (with the same base name, but the extension .txt in place of .jpg or .gif - see here for an explanation what this may mean on a Windows system with hidden file name extensions) with some information about the photo and name of the photographer. Plain 7-bit ASCII (US-ASCII, ISO 646) text is sufficient, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) eight-bit characters or HTML entity codes like &uuml; can be used too, also HTML tags like <P> for paragraphs and <BR> for line breaks (please notice that line breaks are otherwise not recognized in HTML). Please do not upload MS Word, RTF or full HTML files just renamed with extension .txt, as these cannot be parsed by our scripts.

Here is a simple example:

ABC locomotive 123 456 with a local train, leaving station Anyplace
for Somewhere Else.

Photo by J. Random User (user@host.domain.net)

For each photograph, the name of the photographer or copyright owner must be given with a valid e-mail contact address. Pictures that are not submitted with an accompanying text file containing the required information will be rejected. So, the name of the photographer/copyright owner AND an e-mail contact address is required, the e-mail address alone is not sufficient. Neither is a website URL instead of an e-mail address.
If you don't want your e-mail address to appear on the HTML pages, you may place it on a separate line with "#" as the first character. Each line in a .txt file beginning with "#" is regarded as a comment and will not be incorporated into the pix.html page, not even in the HTML source. But the e-mail address must be stated somewhere in the .txt file!

If you're interested in more details on what can be put into a .txt file, see the instructions on writing text files for the Railfaneurope.net Picture Gallery.

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