Posting images in messages

[Paul]

Many of the messages posted on your Forum include photos and some of you will be wondering how to include them in your messages so here are a few hints & tips.

The easiest way to put a picture in your post is to upload it to the forum as an attachment. To do this, click More Options at the bottom of the message edit window. In here is an option to Attach. Click browse and find the picture you want to upload. Click 'more attachments' to add more. You can add up to 10 per message.

Once you have finished click Post as usual but be aware that this may take longer then a normal message as it has to copy the pictures from your computer to the Forum's database for safe storage.


Linking to an image in your message.

If you want the image to be stored elsewhere, perhaps to use it for another site as well ( like Facebook for example) you can alternatively link to it so that it displays as an image in your post. We reserve the right to copy images that you post in this way to our servers to maintain the site and to ensure it runs smoothly.  In order to do this, your image must be hosted somewhere on the web which allows "linking" to that image. Yahoo! photo albums and Geocities pages don't allow linking but there are several sites which will host your photos free of charge. is probably the best known but a Google search for "free photo hosting" will bring up many others. They all have limits to either the number of photos, the size of photos and/or the total space and bandwidth you can have but - who's grumbling, it's free!

OK, so your image is "hosted", how do you get it in a message? First of all, the image host will tell you what the web address, or "URL" of the image is. Copy that from their web-site (the procedure varies depending on which browser you are using) and then come back to the message you are composing here. When you want to insert your image, click on the second button along in the second row of tools above your message window (it looks like a framed picture   and will say "Insert Image" if you hover your mouse pointer over it). Two sets of square brackets will appear with "img" between the first pair and "/img" between the second pair. The cursor will be between them and you can immediately paste the saved URL where the cursor is. Now move your cursor outside the last square bracket and carry on typing! Another way is to paste in your URL, then use your mouse pointer to highlight it and then click on the button. The forum will then automatically add the tags to the beginning and end of the URL. Obviously you can just type the codes in yourself as well but whichever way you do it, you should end up with something like this (without the box round it - that's just there to make this message display  the codes, not act  on them!):-

Code:

This is message text and [img]this is an image[/img]

If you use Photobucket, you can select the complete code stream right from the first square bracket to the last square bracket and paste it into your message complete. (note that Photobucket use upper-case letters for "IMG" and "/IMG" and they will still work in this forum but don't in some other forum software.)

There are no limits to the number of images you can insert because the images are downloaded to the viewer directly from the host without using any of our bandwidth or storage space but please have some thought for those on dial-up connections and try to compress your images as much as possible. Our forum software limits the size of displayed images but if you use FireFox you can right-click on the image and use "View Image" to dispaly it full size. It's also worth remembering that if you delete your image from the host, it will no-longer show up in your message!

Please remember when linking to another image hosted on a different site that Copyright may apply and permission from the host should always be sought before posting it.

Now if anyone wants to post test messages, please do so after this and if they don't work, leave them there so I can edit them. Then you can have a look at them yourself with the "Modify" button to see what the message structure looks like when it works.