How to post photos in the forum

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en7jos
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How to post photos in the forum

Post by en7jos »

Dear All,

The question seems to crop up quite often in the forum and has been mostly answered in various threads and PM's which get lost in the archive. So thought I might do something useful over my morning cuppa and write a quick idiots guide...

Hosting your photos on the web
Unfortunately, you cannot upload photo's directly to the forum as it has no way of storing the images. So you need to find some way to get them in the public domain (i.e. off your own computer) so that others can access them. There are various options

- The first option is to upload them to the 'Photo's section of this web site using the form here: http://www.ajs-matchless.com/pic_add_form.asp. I think the pictures are moderated before going live (right Eamonn?) so it might take a few days before they appear and you can link to them.

- The other option is to use another photo-sharing web site such as PhotoBucket (http://photobucket.com/) or Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/). You need to set up an account the first time you use it, but then should all be fairly straight forward subsequently.

- The last option is to upload the image to your own web site, if you have one.

Inserting the photo into a post
Once you have your photo uploaded to the web somewhere you can then insert it into a post. When you're composing your message, you'll see various buttons above the bit you type in with the heading "Format". On the top row of these button, the 7th from the left is a picture of a tree and if you hover the mouse over it the text that appears says "Insert Image". The button is highlighted in the screenshot below:



When you click this button, the box that pops-up gives lets you enter the URL (i.e. the web address starting http//:www.etc) for the graphic. The easiest way to get this is to open the picture in another browser window. Make sure you are looking at the photo only, not a web page which is displaying the photo. Look at the address bar - if you're looking at the photo only the address will end with the pictures filename (e.g. mypicture.jpg), but if it ends with html etc then you're looking at a web page displaying the picture, rather than the actual picture itself.

One tip if you find that you are looking at a webpage rather than the picture is to left click on the picture and hold. Then drag the picture into the address bar of your browser. When you release, it should then open the address of the image itself. You can try this on the screenshot image above - drag the photo into the web address bar and the picture alone should display whether the rest of this webpage (click 'back' to come back after).

Once you have the web address of your picture, select and 'copy' it. This should be the full web address which will look something like http://www.photobucket.com/james/mypicture.jpg.

Go back to the posting page on the forum and post this web address into the box that pops up when you click on the tree, then click on OK. The web address of the image will appear at the end of your existing message surrounded by some bits of code that tell the forum program how to display the photo. These bits of code are a "[ img ]" before the web address and a "[ /img ]" after the web address (without the spaces inside the square brackets). Don't change or edit these bits of code otherwise it won't work.

To see whether everything has worked, click on the 'Preview' button to see how your message looks before committing it to public view. If all looks ok then you can click on 'Post New Topic' or 'Post New Reply' as appropriate. And that's about it!

Update: If you're having problems posting a picture and can only get the image link to show up, then check the [ img ] and [ /img] tags to make sure they are in lowercase and NOT capitalised. This seems to upset the forum if they are capitalised, see the various replies below...

Photo sizes
The forum displays the photos exactly how they are without any resizing, framing or other edits to make them look right. This means that they will displayed at 100% of the actual size of the image. As modern camera take images which can be printed at A4, A3 or even bigger, you will find that the picture appears super-size unless you reduce the size a bit first. A sensible maximum size for posting is about 640 x 480 pixels - this will give you a photo in the forum which measures about 6x7". You certainly don't want to go much bigger than this otherwise it makes navigating the thread and viewing the photo a bit difficult.

If you're using one of the photo hosting web sites (e.g. Picasa or PhotoBucket) then this might automatically resize the photo for you when you upload it, but chances are it might still be a bit too big. The easiest way to resize the image on your computer is to open it up in a program such as "Paint" and then save a copy with a lower resolution (make sure you don't save it with the same name as your original if you want to keep the high resolution version). In Paint, click on "Image" then from the drop-down list "Resize/skew" (the second option down). In the resize/skew pop-up box, enter some percentages in the 'horizontal' and 'vertical' boxes.

Make sure you enter the same percentages in both otherwise the photo will become distorted, and leave the skew bit well alone. Entering 50% will halve the picture size, 70% will reduce it by 30%, etc. You can repeat this resizing several times until you are happy with the image size. If you want to see the size of the image, click on 'Image' then 'Attributes' and it will show you the number of pixels for the image. The size of the image as you see it in Paint will be the same as it will appear on the forum as it displays at 100% zoom (i.e. actual size). Save the resized image and then you're ready to upload it as described above.

Other notes
A couple of other notes with regards to posting photos on the forums. Firstly, please make sure that whatever location you upload your photos to that they stay there as long as possible and don't get deleted. It is quite frustrating reading back through the post archives to find a thread of interest which contains some photos you want to see (or that the thread is discussing), but the photos are now longer available and all you get to see is the red 'x' to show that the picture is now missing. Maybe set up a separate directory in whichever hosting system you are using for forum photos and remember to leave it be.

The forum sometimes seems to work a little differently depending upon whether you are using a PC or an Apple Mac, and also depending upon what web browser you are looking at the internet with. There used to be an issue posting photos from a PC and this would only work if you were on a Mac, but this now seems to have been fixed.

Well that's about it, simple hey!

Regards, James

Edit: Corrected a few typos....Edited by - en7jos on 07 Sep 2011 01:27:45 AMEdited by - en7jos on 08 Sep 2011 05:56:16 AM
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DWS
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Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2009 3:07 pm
Location: Holmfirth, West Yorkshire

How to post photos in the forum

Post by DWS »

Hi James

Couldn't have done better myself, well done.
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wilko
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How to post photos in the forum

Post by wilko »

My brain still hurts after umpteen trys!Don't know about dragging anything with PC?
en7jos
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How to post photos in the forum

Post by en7jos »

quote:
Don't know about dragging anything with PC?


To "drag" the picture, hover your mouse over said image, press the left mouse button and keep it down. Now move the mouse (keeping the left button held down) and 'drag' the picture. Point the mouse anywhere in the web address bar of your browser (the long box with the website name and address in) and then finally release the left mouse button and 'drop' the picture into the address bar. It actually drops the web address of the image (as opposed to the image itself) into the address box and so the browser opens up that picture directly (as opposed to opening it within whatever web page it's in).

Whilst you're in the process of 'dragging' the picture (i.e. whilst you have the left mouse button pressed) the cursor will change. On my laptop it goes to a symbol that looks like the red circle and diagonal line of roadsigns, but might be different on your PC/Mac (or might not look like Aussie road signs!).

Hope this helps! If not, maybe you have a metric mouse - apparently the forum only works with Whitworth ones...
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My Matchless G3LS website is here - http://www.matchlessclueless.com
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wilko
Posts: 2337
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:45 pm
Location: victoria AUSTRALIA

How to post photos in the forum

Post by wilko »

wilko
Posts: 2337
Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:45 pm
Location: victoria AUSTRALIA

How to post photos in the forum

Post by wilko »

Nah! I did the drag and drop but still didn't work. When i drag and drop i then left clicked to copy. Should i have done this? I was using a photobucket pic.
en7jos
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How to post photos in the forum

Post by en7jos »

Wilko, looks like you have done everything correctly.... but I think I have just spotted the problem!

In your (failed) picture post above, the [ img ] and [ /img ] tags before and after the link are in capitals for some reason (i.e. [ IMG ] Try changing them to both to lowercase.

Cutting and pasting your previous post I get

[IMG]http://i244.photobucket.com/albums/gg3/ ... 5-19_3.jpg[/IMG]

if I leave the capitals as you had, but if I change them to lowercase I get:



This seems to have worked in the preview, so lets see if it works for real when I click 'post'....
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My Matchless G3LS website is here - http://www.matchlessclueless.com
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en7jos
Posts: 1063
Joined: Wed Oct 13, 2010 12:00 pm
Location: Hong Kong
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How to post photos in the forum

Post by en7jos »

Woohoo - it works (and doesn't work) depending upon whether the [ img] tags are lowercase or capitalised!

Hopefully problem solved?

P.S. So what's the photo then? A good illustration of how posting a picture which is too big screws up the formatting and readability of the thread though.
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itma
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How to post photos in the forum

Post by itma »

George Best on a very bad day?
wilko
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Location: victoria AUSTRALIA

How to post photos in the forum

Post by wilko »

But why would the tags be capitalized? I didn't tamper, i just clicked. And no -one was on drugs during that shoot, it was an old slide i scanned which has deteriated. Sorry about size.
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