SpitFireBikers & SplitFireBikers

Admin Age : 26 Joined : 17 Mar 2008 Posts : 52

Hi,

I'm writing this topic up for those who wanted to post pics up in the forum, but had very little idea on how to do it.

The steps i'm gonna show you below is the simplest and most common form of hotlinking image to any message boards or forums, but it'll take abit of work (if an extra few clicks is hard wok for you.) Subsequently, i'll update this thread with more advanced picture posting methods if the need arise. Let's get on with the basics now.

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First, u must have your image ready somewhere within your computer, it could be in Desktop, My Documents, in your C drive, D drive or whatever drive u saved it. in my example, for simplicity sake, i'm putting an image on the desktop.

then go to any image hosting site that you preferred, imageshack, photobucket, flickr... whatever la... but my preferrence is towards imageshack, so i'm gonna use it as example. but it'll be more or less the same with any other sites.

www.imageshack.us

click on "BROWSE" to locate the pic u want to upload. a popup box will come up. highlight the file, and press ok.

if your pic comes in big resolution (if u copied direct from your camera) then u can tick the box to let the site resize it for you. normally what i do is to resize the pic on my own before uploading, doing so saves the upload time. so i'll leave the box unchecked. i'd also recommend photo size of 640x480 (a.k.a VGA size a.k.a 0.3 megapixel)

make sure you check the 2nd box for them to remove the size imprint. u dont want it to spoil your beautifully taken pic, do you? Hit "HOST IT" to upload you pic.

now you've come to the page where there are a few option and boxes with all the garbles... ignore those. you dont need those yet. proceed to the lowest box at the bottom. it's the direct link. copy it.

then come back to our forum thread, go into the posting page, either to create a new thread, or to post a reply. where u want the pic to show up u just need to key in :-

[i m g]paste the direct link here[/ i m g]

so what you get now is something like this,

[i m g]http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/7695/grouppiche0.jpg[/i m g]

do make sure there are no space between I, M and G. i did this on purpose to fool the forum from treating it like an image link. The [] box is called html tags, and there a many functions to it. linking of images like what we're doing now is just one of it. img stands for IMaGe if you dont know.

once u post up your message, the picture will come up in your reply/post!

if you close up the spaces in between i, m & g, this is what you'll get.

Tah-Daaaa!!!

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so go ahead and start by posting you own photo. then your bike's. then your rides!

There will be a time that u may have lotsa pics to post. Khaiharlock suggested that you post the (clickable) links and not the hotlinking itself, but i thought that perhaps you can post a few as intro/teasers, then stash the rest away in some online archive, and you just post the links to it.

Then another idea came to me. With some tweaking, u can actually hide the links to your online archive rigt behind the pictures, whereby clicking on the pics will bring you to the online archive, but i'd leave this for some other time ok?

Khai also mentioned about another function, where there's an icon to host pics in the posting page. while this might seems easier abit (coz u dont have to go to image hosting sites and get the hassle of copy and pasting) but i'd advise AGAINST it.

Reason being, hosting the picture will eat up the limited bandwidth we have in running this site, so u'll experience slow loading. Hotlinking instead, the image is saved somewhere else, the html tags only instructs your browser to fetch the image from so-and-so website (direct links, remember?) so it doesnt affect the server's bandwidth much. Well, it's free so i cant complaint or ask for more bandwidth allocation though.

Till the next update, have fun posting!