Thursday, November 30, 2006

Posting Pictures on the forum...

Everyone wants to post their pictures on our forum, but often it causes a lot of grief to those that haven't done it before.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that you have a digital camera already, and know how to get the pictures from your camera onto your computer. Ok. Next step...

The next thing you need is a picture editing program. You can use any number of programs for this, but one that's installed on your computer already (if you use a Windows computer) is Paint. Paint can be found from your Start menu - Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Paint. It's a simple program, and doesn't do a lot of things well, but it's there, and it works (to a degree).

If you want to download a simple, free and quite decent program, consider IrfanView. IrfanView is very easy to use, and I've never had any problems with it. You can use IrfanView to easily resize pictures, crop them down (cut the center out of a picture), and many other things. It's so trivially easy, I won't even need to spend any time explaining it here!

This brings me to the next point. Try to keep the image size that you post on the forums to less than 100kilobytes in size. You can find the size of your picture by right-clicking on it (wherever it is, in Windows Explorer, on your desktop, etc.), and then selecting "Properties". One field in the Properties window is Size. Keeping your images less than 100kilobytes will allow those images to load faster, take up less space on the server, and usually bigger doesn't bring enough of an improvement in quality to make it worthwhile.

Now that you have a picture, or pictures, ready to post, you'll need to either host them somewhere, or upload them to the forum. If you wish to put more than one picture in a post, you'll need to upload them to a picture-hosting website. Some of them are:
It's very simple to host pictures there, and there are HowTo guides as well as good instructions on how to post. Once you post, they will give you a URL that you can use in your posting to point to the picture.

If you only want to put one picture in a post, then you can simply use the picture hosting on the forum.

Lastly, a good quality picture album on your PC is very nice to have. I can highly recommend Google's Picasa. It's free, and works very well. It has many, many nice options builtin. You can download it through the link at the bottom of this page...

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