How to post pictures on forums

[Genesis]

Many times have I read, here and there on my forums and on others such as this one, "how do I post pictures?" or "hey! I want a cool picture as a signature to! How do you do that?", so, here is the answer. The answers, to be precise.

 

Let's say you've just made cool screenshots and you'd like to share them. First, you have to upload them somewhere on the internet; there are loads of free image hosts such as www.photobucket.com or www.imageshack.us.

 

Okay, I assume that you now have an account, and know how to upload pictures on your hosting space. It's time go get your picture's URL, the address that will tell the forum where to look for your picture and download it for the world to see. Refer to your host's online help for further reference if you experience problems or if you don't understand what I'm talking about right now. If you still don't understand after you've read the online help, burn your computer and try softball or drinking beers all day long, you'll never be a real geek.

 

BBCode works like HTML. BBCode is the very, very simple code used by forums like this one. There are a few commands that allow you to enrich your messages with, for example, bold or italic characters, various font sizes, quotes, AND pictures.

 

Now, the forum is an application. It "reads" each page, considering that everything in a post is text, unless you tell him it's not. To do so, use the commands, as seen above. But how? It's quite simple. You want a word to appear in bold? Add

[b] before and
[/b] after the word

 

Now, it's exactly the same thing. A forum is not clever enough to guess that you want to post a picture, so you have to tell him that the URL you got from your host IS A PICTURE and not text.

 

Use [img] before your picture's url and
[/img] just after, as in
[img=http://www.myhost.com/myaccount/pictureiwannapost.jpg]

 

And there, you'll get your picture to appear on the forum!

Signatures work the same way, just use the same trick in the signature text block in the "my controls/edit signature" page.

 

Note: another way of adding the tags to a URL in your posts is to select the address and then click the IMG button in the Code Buttons section, which appears just above the text block when you post a message with "new topic", "add reply" or "edit post" but NOT with "fast reply".

 

Now you might wonder how we copy-paste pictures from other forums and websites, like in the "funny pictures" section. Well, if you see a picture you want to copy (if hot-linking* is allowed from this site), right-click it, check its "properties", and you will see its URL somewhere in the small pop-up window. Warning, in some cases you might have to scroll left or right to copy the whole address (depending on your browser, some show the beginning of the address, others show the end), otherwise it will not work.

 

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*hot-linking: to copy-paste pictures directly from a site/forum A to site/forum B without properly hosting them first. Site A will provide the bandwidth for people who visit site B to see the picture, and some webmasters and forum admins don't like that AT ALL.

[Eliteone]

Little add-on for this good info.

 

On this board if you click the IMG above the post composing it puts up a pop up for you to input the URL to the image you wish to insert into your post. After you click ok the img Url wrapped in the proper code appears in your post.