A digital photo's dimensions are measured in pixels. A photo from a digital camera might be several thousand pixels wide, and that's just too big for the Web. That being the case, you'll need to reduce the size of your photo. You can do that either by using your photo editing software or uploading it to any one of several free photo hosting Web sites that will handle the resizing for you.
To post your photo, you must upload it to a Web server (you can't link directly to it from your personal computer). If you've properly sized and formatted your photo, you may upload it directly to this forum's server. If you'd rather not do this, uploading the photo to a free hosting site, and then linking to it from your post is the way to go. I'll cover them both below:
Option 1. Free photo hosting Web sites: There are several of these to choose from, like Photobucket, Flickr, ImageShack, Picasa, etc. Each of these Web sites enable you to create a free account, and then upload your photos to them. These services are great since they enable you to create online digital photo albums to share with family, friends and link directly to from your posts on the Gun Dog Breeders forum. I can't explain how each service works, so I'll just explain the one of the most popular — Photobucket.
- First, you'll need to set up a free account on Photobucket..
- After doing this, you'll need to upload the photo from your computer to your Photobucket account.
- After it's uploaded (it might take a minute), the photo should appear in your Photobucket album. When it does, click the "edit" button that's above the thumbnail of the photo that you just uploaded. Again, this might take a minute to load.
- Next you'll see a bunch of tools to edit your photo. For our purposes, we'll ignore them all except the "Resize" tool. Click the resize tool and you'll have the option to resize your photo.
- Make sure that the "Keep proportions" box is checked, then in the boxes that say "New size" type the number "800" into the first box (the number in the second box will automatically adjust).
- After doing this click the "Apply" button, then click either the "Save a copy" or the "Replace original" buttons at the bottom of the page.
- You'll now be taken automatically to a page with some options to share the photo that you just resized.
- On the left side of the page, you should see something that says "IMG Code." To the left of it, you'll see a field of code that looks something like this: [img]http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c310/my-account/b.jpg[/ img]
- Clicking inside that field, will copy the code that's in that field.
- After you've clicked and copied this code, head back to the Gun Dog Breeders forum, then paste this code directly into your post, and submit the post as you normally would. The photo should now appear in your post.
Option 2. Uploading directly to Gun Dog Breeders: Okay, so you know your way around editing digital photos and just want to upload your photo to the forum without using Photobucket or a similar service. Reduce your photo to a reasonable size that won't cause people to wait forever to view your photo. If you want the entire photo to appear in the post window, keep it to 600 pixels wide. You can make it larger, but people will need to double click on it to see the whole thing. Make sure that it's an RGB photo and that you save it in JPEG (.jpg) format using a good amount of compression (again to reduce photo download time).
Type your Gun Dog Breeders post, then click the "Upload attachment" tab beneath the windows into which you type your post. Browse to the photo on your computer, then click the "Add the file" button. Click the "Preview" button to see your post with the photo in it. If it looks right, go ahead and click the "Submit" button to make your post. You also have the option before actually clicking the "Submit" button to position the photo between lines of your text and to give the photo a caption. To do this, click the "Place inline" button, then position that code that is automatically inserted into your text into whatever position within your post you want to photo to appear. Add a caption by filling out the "File comment" field. Click the "Preview button" to make sure it's how you want it to appear, then if all is good, click the "Submit" button to make your post.
