My good friend, Liam, decided to take a short break in the Snowdonia National Park and, last week, we met up to do a short walk (of approx. 4 miles) around the Gwydyr Forest, starting from Betws-y-Coed. As you will see from the route map and photo gallery, it was a circular walk, taking in the very tip of Llyn (lake) y Parc, lots of forest paths and several waterfalls.
I hope you enjoy your virtual visit to this small, but very beautiful, part of North Wales.
Technical note: I’d noticed that my photos were appearing quite small on the screen. I think this is because I was shrinking them to around 350kb, to save space and allow them to be loaded quickly. So this time, I’ve shrunk them to around 1Mb in the hope that the gallery ‘experience’ is much better. Please let me know if you have difficulty loading or seeing them and I’ll revert to the smaller format.
Alittlebitoutoffocus 
The images look good Mike, sometimes it’s difficult to tell image quality as wp compress them anyway. Boosting to 1mb helps but will soon eat into the free gbs. My shots are usually 6 or 7 mb and I had to pay for extra storage and I regularly delete older posts but one day I may have to increase the storage again!
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Yes, it’s rather strange, as I checked some of my very early posts, (e.g. from 2016), where all the photos were reduced to not much more than 250kb and they still display OK. So I’m wondering what has changed…(?) 🤔
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A couple of years back wp increased the compression rate on images. I noticed this right away but cannot revert this unless I purchase their ‘Business Plan’ and then a plug-in, yeah right.
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Yes, these companies can be very sneaky! Force you to load extra Gb’s and then charge you for the privilege! I’m not sure how full my storage is (I’ll have to check now I’ve thought about it) but it may signal the demise of my blog. As mentioned, all of my earlier pics are very small, so I wouldn’t save much by deleting them and I quite like to look back at the history occasionally…
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Just checked and it’s 9.3 GB used, out of a 13.0 GB upload limit, so 71%. But if all my pics in future are to be (at least) 2 or even 3 times the size, it won’t take long to reach the limit… Maybe there’s a way to reproduce my earlier gallery ‘views’… I shall have to talk to one of the WP Happiness engineers and report back!
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I can asure you that the pictures look great and the resolution is sufficiant Mike. You made a lovely hike and it looks like you have very much the same nice weather as we had here during the last weeks. For your information, I use to make my pictures 1280 px wide (or high) and save them for ‘web” (a photoshop option under ‘export as…”) the images are always far less than 1 MB.
Many greets, Rudi
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Many thanks for your comments and advice Rudi, but it remains a puzzle (to me anyway). As I just commented to Brian, my old posts still look OK and many of those photos are not even 300kb.
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Wonderful images from your” hike Mike! I would love to walk in this kind of nature. The trees and rocks covered in moss make it look like a fairy tale forest and the waterfall looks amazing. Nice effect on the frozen water as well. 😄
No, I couldn’t notice any difficulty when loading your lovely photos.
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Yes, it’s a lot different to your walks I’m sure. And thanks for letting me know about the loading of the images. That’s very useful. 😀
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Absolutely stunning photos Mike! The tall trees and waterfalls are exquisite!
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Many thanks Maxine. I dare say those waterfalls may be frozen today… Just like the old days!! 😀
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Indeed! Quite like old times, I bet! 👍
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It actually feels colder here at something like -2 degrees compared to say -10 in Switzerland – mainly because of the damper air, but also there is a little wind. Normally it’s very windy, so things could be worse!
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