The 'Virtual History Tour of Marple & District'

On-line since 2001 with images viewed more than 5.6 Million times!

History of this Site

First Generation: 2001 - 2006

The Virtual History Tour of Marple & District came on-line in March 2001 and was one of the first Internet photo galleries of its kind. The original version of the site was created by Mark Whittaker and Peter Clarke and used free web space and the help of a number of people who allowed their collections of postcards and photographs to be scanned.

By 2003 the 'Tour' had become very popular and we invested in extra web space to allow us to continue adding more photos and to avoid the problem of 'pop-up' advertisements spoiling visitors’ enjoyment. The site continued to grow beyond expectations and designs, primarily due to the great response from so many people who helped us to expand it, and by 2006 it held over 1,000 images.

Second Generation: 2006 - 2024

Unfortunately the html format originally used to create the Tour in 2001 did not lend itself to the easy addition of new images into existing galleries and it became increasingly difficult to update and maintain as more and more images were added.

Drastic action was required and with the cost of web space reducing and free software becoming available that allowed database categorisation of images, Mark was able to completely reconstruct the site using an on-line photo album package called Coppermine. This enabled the albums to be updated, re-categorised and re-described to our hearts’ content, as well as allowing searches, voting for favourites, sending postcards and keeping track of how many times each image was viewed.

Following the reconstruction in 2006 the 'Tour' went from strength to strength and by November 2024, an amazing 23 years after it was begun, it contained over 15,234 images that had been viewed a staggering 5,556,473+ times!

Third Generation: 2024 - onward...

In late 2024, with the Coppermine platform becoming difficult to maintain or upgrade, and not being mobile friendly, it was decided to migrate to an alternative open-source platform called Piwigo.

In December 2024 the first albums were migrated to this 3^rd Generation site.

Moving more than 15,000 images is going to be a long process and while this is ongoing visitors will need to switch between the 2^nd and 3^rd Generation sites in order to access all the images we have available online.