Posting Pictures

[Richard]

A lot of people want to post pictures, but many aren't sure how to do it. Here is a simple tutorial on how to put your own pictures into this (or pretty much any other) forum.

First you will need an account to a free image hosting site. Here are a few...

www.flickr.com
www.imageshack.us
www.photobucket.com
photos.google.com

For the purpose of the tutorial, www.flickr.com is used. It is very easy to use.

1) Log on to your chosen image hosting site (create a membership first, obviously) and upload (i.e. put onto the host server) your photo.

Find the location of the image on the hard drive of your computer. Different hosts may allow you to upload more than one photo at a time. If so, you can upload them all at once to avoid repeating this step all the time.

2) Once the picture has been uploaded, you can add a title and description. After you save your images on the server, they should appear in your image hosting gallery.

3) This step is a part of good net etiquette. Perhaps your picture is rather big...well, it'd be ugly and mess up the message board page. It'd also take a long time to load.

That's one of the reasons many people like flickr.com, as it automatically offers photos of different sizes. Let's go pick a photo to display.
Click on your photo and you can see an option called 'all sizes'.
From there, choose the best size. It is recommended to use 'medium' which is about 500 pixels wide. This is generally a good size for message boards. Smaller is ok too, but don't go any bigger!

At the bottom of that page (the image size you've chosen) you can see some options. One is the link to the image including a flickr.com advertisement. The second one is the plain link to the image.

NOTE: the link to the image should contain .png, .jpg or .gif ... these represent the most common image formats.

Copy that link -> Right Click -> Copy!

4) Now you need to open the Spark Zone message page that you want to put picture in.

Paste your link -> Righ click -> Paste!

Highlight that link and click the 'Img' button in the Forum message body composition body (it is in the same line as B, I, U, Quote, etc.).

Now you're done!! All you need to do is add your information and repeat the steps to add other images. Those images should display normally within the thread.

Good luck!