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Uploading Photos

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admin

Wed Sep 04 2013, 06:36pm

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Joined: Tue Apr 22 2008, 11:38am

Posts: 144

Any registered user of this website can upload photos as part of a forum post. Please do!

"How Do I Upload a Photo?"

The process is pretty simple. Once you're in the forum, hit the "New Thread" button to open the editing window for your post. This will cause an editing window to open where you can type your text. Look under the editing window and you'll see a section that says "Attach file / image." In that section, there's a "Browse" button. Hit the "Browse" button to navigate to the place on your hard drive where your photo is.

Once you select the right photo, you'll be taken back to the editing window. Hit the "Preview" button at the bottom and wait for your photo to upload. Be patient -- you're actually moving a copy of your photo file onto the server, and it can take a minute or two, depending on your connection.

Once that's done, the system will show you what your post will look like (so far). It's not posted yet! It's just a preview. Beneath the preview is a refreshed version of the text-editing window, which will now include something like this:

That's your photo, as the text editor sees it -- that whole chunk of bracketed text. You can move the whole thing around, center it, and so on. For example, if you want your photo to be at the top, copy all that bracketed stuff and paste it at the top of your text. The key phrase, though, is "the whole thing." Don't just copy parts of it, and don't fiddle with anything inside the square brackets. It's a package deal.

You can keep hitting the "Preview" button over and over to your heart's content until you're happy with the way your post will look if and when you actually post it. It won't actually be posted on the site and become visible to other people until you hit the "Submit New Thread" button.

Note that you can only upload a photo in a "New Thread." You can't do it in a forum "Reply."

"It Won't Let Me Upload My Photo!"

If your photo won't upload, it's probably too big. In addition to the 20MB limit on the size of the file, the image needs to be no wider than 600 pixels.

Most people don't fully appreciate just how HUGE the files created by their cameras are, compared to what's appropriate for a website. It's not uncommon for your digital camera to produce an image 2500 pixels wide by 1500 pixels tall. That's a good resolution if you're planning to put it on a billboard on I-40, but for a computer screen, 600 x 360 would be plenty.

Remember that the size of that file, in pixels, is LENGTH x WIDTH -- so the 2500-wide version is going to have 3.75 million pixels total, while the 600-wide version is only going to have 216,000 pixels total. So the 600-wide version is only 5.76% of the 2500-wide version. Another way of putting this is that the file for the 2500-wide version is going to be more than 17 times bigger than it needs to be for display on a computer.

Gigantic photo files take a long time to upload, which is bad for you. And they clutter up the website's server for no good reason, which is bad for the website.

Photos can easily be resized by using Photoshop, GIMP, or (probably) the software that came with your camera. It really isn't difficult. In the spirit of "teach a man to fish," here are some good places to start:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omc-UB_wa3E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzNN22ahW0M

[ Edited Sun Jun 13 2021, 06:38pm ]


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