Cookies Policy

This website uses "cookies". They can be turned off but a number of things won’t work. By using this site, you agree to how they are used, as detailed below.

What are cookies?

"Cookies" are little files that a website can drop information into a read information from. They are stored on your computer, and you can even go and find them on your hard drive if you're determined. There are various explanations and descriptions of them, but this is a good place to start. They are useful for websites for all sorts of reasons. Some sites like eBay, Facebook and Google use them for marketing and adverts, allowing them to work out what kind of online shopping you are likely to do and thus present you with more relevant adverts (some browsers allow you to disable this kind of use). Others sites, like mine and many others use them just to make themselves easier and more attractive to use. Another example is online shopping carts, where the items you add to your cart are actually listed in one of these "cookies". Due to the many things they are used for, you are likely to have many things in your cookie already.

To view your current cookies, click here:

What does this site use cookies for?

This site uses cookies for two reasons, the first and foremost is the shopping cart system. I designed and created the shopping cart on this site myself (so apologies if you don't like it - feedback is welcome). Rest assured this is a perfectly safe system for shopping. When you add an item to the cart, it is added to the list of items in the "cart cookie". When you view the cart, the cart reads the contents of the "cart cookie" and calculates how much everything will cost, whether it is in stock and gives you options for postage. When you proceed to payment, the transaction details such as the total cost get passed to PayPal before you enter any financial information. At this point, the transaction is as safe as any other that uses PayPal. Then PayPal would show you these figures, and if you didn't like them, you could just close the page. (You can use PayPal to pay by card if you don't have a PayPal account).

The second thing I use cookies for, is to tell if you've visited the site before. The only purpose of knowing this is so that the image galleries know whether to display the "help" information. The first time you viewed my site and viewed an image, the help message would have displayed. After that point, it shouldn't display again. This cookie doesn't store any information about you or even know who you are. The website merely checks if this cookie exists on your computer, and if it does, it knows you've been here before.

There are also a couple of cookies used to control how cookies are used. Funnily enough, one controls whether cookies should be used at all. If you chose to disable cookies, this information would have to be stored in a cookie! There isn't any way around this because this is the kind of thing cookies are for.

How long do the cookies stay on my machine?

I'll let you choose this one! When a cookie is set, it is told how long it should last for.

• If it isn't told how long it should last, it will last as long as the "session" does. If you close your browser, you end the "session". This means, if you added some items to the cart, then opened another tab on your internet browser and closed my site, spent some time surfing the net then came back to my site; the items would still be in your cart (how wonderful!). However, if you added items to the cart then closed your internet browser, the items would be gone. This is how the cookies on my site behave by default and is how a lot of shopping carts behave.
• If a cookie is told how long it should last, it will last that long, after the last time it was changed. So if you set it to last an hour. You could have a shopping cart full of items, then close your browser and restart your computer. If you opened my site again within an hour, you'd still have your cart.

You can choose how long the cookies on this site last using this drop down list (this will change how long your shopping cart lasts):

Remember, this only affects the cookies on my site. I would recommend setting it for a year so nothing is lost - the cookie is only a few kB big.

How do I disable cookies?

There are two ways: probably the best way is to click the icon in the bottom left of the screen and click "Cookies are on" which will turn red and display "Cookies are off". This turns off cookies on my website (except the one that is used to remember you turned them off). Most internet browsers also allow you to turn off cookies in their settings. I would personally recommend not doing this though, as lots of sites wont function correctly.