COLLECTION:  "PD" PHOTOS DEPOSITED
WITH US AS DIGITAL IMAGES

During the Summer of 2020, we acquired a copy on CD of around 1200 images (mostly photos) gathered over many years by a local collector, who has lived and worked in Leiston all his life.  Apart from a handful of images for Martlesham Heath airfield, the images are from the Alde Valley.  We aim to secure this very local collection, identifying and documenting as many of its images as we can — respecting its identity by keeping it separate from our other resources, but aligning it to our normal indexing.  As this work is completed, the images will be secured on the computers in our Help Centre for personal viewing only.

The Collection contains computer-folders of images for each the communities of Aldeburgh (54√ images), Aldringham (267), Benhall (20), Friston (45√), Knodishall (42√), Leiston (66), Martlesham Heath airfield (5√), Orford (18), Saxmundham (5√), Sizewell (125), Slaughden (12√), Snape (79), Theberton (5√) and Thorpeness (150 + (dated 1929/30) 297√) — each total can vary slightly because of a very few reallocations between communities.  Additionally a "miscellaneous-pix" folder contains a maximum of three images each for Dunwich, Farnham, Hazlewood, Iken and Tunstall.

Reference-ID's for each Photos Deposit image are prefixed "PD", then usually the Alde Valley community's three-character abbreviation — see the webpage —

PDlocuuuu, where "loc" is the location/town/village community, and "uuuu" a unique four-character ID —
except for Aldringham (which has so many images) PDARuuuuu, with a unique FIVE-character ID,
and the very few images for each of Iken (PDIKuuuuu) + 5,  Martlesham Heath Airfield (PDMHAIRFu) + 1,  and Theberton (PDTHEBuuu) + 3.

Apart from Aldeburgh (ALB) and those communities just mentioned, almost all other abbreviations are just each placename's first three characters — such as BEN for Benhall.  Although many of the Thorpeness images use the expected THO, exceptionally the nearly 300 publicity photos taken in the 1929/30 season are particularly identified with THN ("N" for "Nineteen-twenty-nine"), and retained in a separate computer-folder (just as in the original Collection).

The unique part of the ID is usually derived from the image-filename on the original issue CD, unless it is inaccurate or another suffix is more sensible.  As far as practicable, that unique part is chosen so that sets of files in each location's folder remain close to their original order, to retain a respectful continuity with the Collection.  The filename also includes a meaningful description, such as for the first-listed of the Aldeburgh images, "PDALB0053_lifeboats-Lucy-Lavers&Abdy-Beauclerk(both-tog-1940-59).jpg".  Its original filename was ap15_003.jpg, and was listed just before another file, de01_003.jpg — renamed as PDALB0103_fishermen-on-beach-c1890.jpg.

However, for Friston, Knodishall, Orford, Sizewell, Slaughden and Snape, the unique four-character ID is often further divided two-and-two so as to gather related images together.  So, for example, there are several views of communities' various windmills where the unique ID is "MLuu", such as an image of Knodishall mill, "PDKNOML33_ Knodishall-windmill.jpg" — formerly "nv29_033.jpg".  For LEISTON, rather less than half the images' ID-suffixes are split three-and-one — for example "GARu" for Garretts' Leiston Works — but most remain unstructured, based more closely on the original Collection's filename, often on the numeric part of it.  For any more detail, see a particular community's entry on the «Index: Alde Valley abbreviations» page. 

If there are more than (say) five images for a community, they don't appear individually in our Index, but only in summary, when the "uuuu"="-PIX" suffix is used to collectively index them as a one-line entry.  So, for example, the title of Knodishall's entry, PDKNO-PIX, includes the comment "(approx 42 images)".

Apart from more descriptive naming of the images, the Collection remains very broadly as was.  However, a few other changes were necessary, listed below.  Mostly, they are images moved to another location's folder because they were miscatalogued.