How to post images

[GlamRockCowboy]

I hate to ask this, and I hope I'm doing it in the right part of the Forum, but can somebody please re-post the instructions on how to post an image file? The "insert image" feature in the Forum message editor doesn't seem to work for me for some reason, particularly when I'm trying to upload an image from my own hard drive. I have several images I'd like to submit for help as far as morphing is concerned. I'd gladly do it myself, but I don't know how, and I do not believe I have the kind of artistic skill required. If someone could at least re-post the image posting instructions, I would deeply appreciate it.

[abbraxis]

And if someone could let me know how to embed YouTube videos, I'd appreciate it. My old method doesn't seem to work anymore...

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by GlamRockCowboy

I hate to ask this, and I hope I'm doing it in the right part of the Forum, but can somebody please re-post the instructions on how to post an image file? The "insert image" feature in the Forum message editor doesn't seem to work for me for some reason, particularly when I'm trying to upload an image from my own hard drive. I have several images I'd like to submit for help as far as morphing is concerned. I'd gladly do it myself, but I don't know how, and I do not believe I have the kind of artistic skill required. If someone could at least re-post the image posting instructions, I would deeply appreciate it.

Okay, you're never going to get the "Insert Image" tool to put a picture from your hard drive directly onto the forum, because that's not what it does. The forum doesn't let you upload files, so it has no upload tool at all. All it does is let you put in a reference to an image on another site. What you need to do is the following:

1. Find your image on another site. (If it's your own picture, you'll need to upload it to another site which permits other sites to refer to your images. Some sites won't let that work.)

2. Figure out how to get the URL of the image. Ideally, you want to select it and choose "copy", but just writing it out somewhere so you can type it in by hand will work. You want something which begins with "http://" or "https://", and ends with ".jpg", ".jpeg", ".gif", or ".png". There are different ways to find this piece of text, to wit:

A. Your web browser's contextual menu (right-click on the image) may have a menu item to do this directly, if the site hasn't disabled it ? in FireFox, there should be an item saying "Copy Image Location", Safari has "Copy Image Address". I don't think Internet Explorer has an option for this, and I don't have Chrome installed and can't find a picture of their contextual menus, so I have no idea if they have such an option or not.

B. If there's no direct option to copy the address, there may be an option in the contextual menu to see "image properties" (or something like that) which may tell you where the image is being stored.

C. If neither of those work, there may also be an option in the contextual menu to "open image in a new window" (or, again, something like that). If you can do this, then the location bar of the new window will tell you the URL.

D. If all else fails, there may be an option in the regular menus (or a button in your toolbar) to see a list of "page resources" (or, once again, something like that). You'll have to find the image in the list of stuff the page loaded, and then figure out how to make the browser give you the URL. (If there's an option to show properties in the list, that may help.)

3. Once you have your image's URL, you can use the "insert image" tool in the forum. When it asks you for a URL, paste or type the URL (depending of course on whether you were able to copy it or had to write it down).

3a. Alternatively, if you prefer not to use the silly buttons, you can type the BBCode instead: [IMG]put the URL here[/IMG]

4. Make sure you choose to "Preview Post" first, before submitting, to check that the image will actually show up. If you get a broken image, it might mean you did something wrong ? but it might also mean that the other site doesn't permit you to put images here.

4a. Some sections of this forum will not permit you to embed images. If you don't know whether the section you're in will do that, check the lower-left corner of the page. Almost at the very bottom is a little box, and it will either say "[IMG] code is on" or "[IMG] code is off". You can only embed images if the code is on.

I believe video embedding works the same way, basically:

1. Copy the YouTube URL for the video, which should look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[jumble of letters]

Hint: if you want, you can make the video start at a particular timecode ? just put "&t=" at the end of the URL, after the jumble of letters, followed by the number of seconds of the starting timecode you want. (It has to be a whole number of seconds, though, and it has to be as a number of seconds, not minutes and seconds ? so "start at 4:33" is "&t=273".)

2. Post using the "Advanced Editor" (if there's a button under your post-editing box saying "Go Advanced", click it to get there).

3. Use the "Insert Link" tool in the editor to paste in your URL with whatever title you want.

3a. Alternatively ? there's always another way ? you can type the BBCode yourself. It should look like:

[URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[jumble of letters]"]Your title[/URL]

4. Make sure the two checkboxes labelled "Automatically parse links in text" and "Automatically embed media (requires automatic parsing of links in text to be on).", which are down below the "Submit" button, are turned on.

4a. I think some sections of the forum won't permit embedded video. Possibly the ones which do are the ones which permit the [IMG] code, but I haven't tested.