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Posting Images With Photobucket


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Members of concertina.net have only a very limited amount of space available for images in forum posts.

 

If you need to post more images than allowed then you either have to delete some of your old images or use an external site to host the images and include links to those images in your post.

 

There are a number of external sites that can be used to host images. I have found that Photobucket works well and does not try to spam your readers when they look at your images.

 

If anyone else uses other sites then please feel free to chime in with your recommendation.

 

In the meantime, here is a 'how to' use Photobucket for your forum images:

 

1. Get an account on Photobucket

 

Go to http://photobucket.com/ and sign up for an account.

 

2. Prepare your images

 

You need to limit the size of your images before you upload them to Photobucket because this forum cannot display huge images and because a free account at Photobucket is limited to 2GB of images. Modern cameras and cell phones can create very high resolution images that would very quickly fill this 2GB limit, but if you resize your images down to something that will display nicely in the forum then 2GB is plenty of space for lots of images.

 

I find that a 640x480 image works fine for the forum, each image is about 100KB or so - small enough to give you thousands of images on Photobucket. 640x480 is only a recommendation - you can go bigger or smaller if you like but do Preview your message before posting as really big images can do weird things.

 

So you need to resize your image before[*] uploading it to Photobucket. There are lots of applications that can resize an image for you. I use a free program called Irfanview, but MS Paint can do it easily and I am sure there are lots of choices on non-Windows platforms. Just be sure not to overwrite your original image with a reduced size version.

 

3. Upload your images to Photobucket

 

You can just upload all of your images into a single space ('bucket') in Photobucket but it is probably better to think a bit about organizing them first. You can have a library of albums for images in Photobucket and I think that it is a good idea to create an album before you upload and then upload to that album.

 

After you have logged in, you will see a screen like this:

 

Initial%20screen.jpg

 

(Yes, this is an image on Photobucket)

 

Click on the Library button shown in the middle of this screen, or in the menu bar at the top.

 

You should then see a page with a list of albums headed by "Create New Album" on the left hand side.

 

Create a new album.

 

Once you are in your album you should see something that says 'Click to upload', so click it.

 

You will now be shown a folder on your computer, navigate to where you stored all of your resized images and select all of the images (you can select multiple images) that you want to upload. "Open" the selected images and Photobucket will upload them to your album. This can sometimes take some time so be patient.

 

4. Embedding your images in a concertina.net forum or message post

 

Start writing your post and when you get to the point where you want to include an image from Photobucket then go the album in Photobucket and click the specific image that you want. On the right hand side you should see:

 

Share%20this%20photo.jpg

 

Click on the second entry: 'Direct'. This should briefly change to say Copied - a link has been copied to your clipboard.

 

Now go back to your forum post and click on the little image icon:

 

Forum%20menu%20buttons2.jpg

 

This will bring up an image properties dialog box with a space labelled URL. Paste the link you copied from Photobucket into this space and click OK.

 

You image should now show up in your post.

 

Rinse and repeat for any other images.

 

5. Preview your post to check that everything is how you want it in the final post. Edit as required.

 

6. Do not move an image on Photobucket after you have posted a link to it on the forum, the link will be broken and the image will disappear from your post.

 

[*] You can resize images inside Photobucket, but this is a very slow process and the resized image does not show up sometimes for hours. I find it better to resize before uploading.

Edited by Don Taylor
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