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I decided to give a try at an explanation of web photo posting for other forum members who are interested in posting and haven’t had any experience with photos on the web. There are many points of view on this and I am trying to present a simple, straight-ahead explanation that is general enough to be understood and specific enough to be helpful. First, a simple explanation of what happens when a photo is posted to the forum. Contrary to popular belief the photo is never actually stored on the forum. When a person views a photo in an online forum, the photo is sent from another web location (other than the forum) to the viewer’s computer. This means that in order to post photos in a forum they must be stored at another web site first. When pictures are stored at an online site, they are given a specific address. When a person posts the picture on the forum for others to view, he is actually giving the forum an address to the photo. The viewer’s computer uses this address to go out and get the photo. The process of posting photos can be broken down into several categories: 1. Taking and editing the photo 2. setting up a web site to store photos and uploading them to the site 3. linking to your photos by using the correct codes and language to have your pictures appear in a forum. 1. Taking and editing the photo. We will presume that you have taken photos of your super cool model railroad with good lighting and clear focus. We need to talk about photo size. Most good, clear digital photos are too big for the web. Generally speaking the larger the size, the better the resolution. Size is measured in image area: given as a dimension (400x600) and in total file size (256kb). We are interested mostly in total file size. Photos can now be as big as 3 or 4 megs (megabyte) with a garden variety digital camera. We want sizes to stay at around 100-150kb. A megabyte is 1,000 kb. Why so small? Remember with a 56k modem (dial up connection speed) it takes around 10 minutes to download 1 meg. If you post very large pictures (even with DSL) it can take quite a while to download them and it is considered rude in cyberspace to do this. To make the file size smaller, photos will have to be compressed. Compression removes part of the picture quality to make the file size smaller. Almost all web photos you see are compressed. Your camera came with software to do this on your PC. You can also crop the photos and otherwise improve contrast etc…When you compress a photo, you make a copy of it with less resolution. You then end up with several versions of the same photo: High resolution originals and compressed versions suitable for e-mail and web posting. After you have compressed your photos, we will presume that you have put them in a folder on your computer. 2. Storing Photos Online Next we need a web site to store your photos. Your web provider may already offer you space as part of your service. Check out the rules carefully, many don’t like remote hosting, which is what we are doing. If you don’t get storage as part of your web provider package, You can pay for web space or you can use one of the photo hosting services that are free on the web. There are many of these free sites they include: Railimages.com Photobucket.com We will presume that you are using a free photo hosting service. Sign up at the site and open an account. Next step is to follow the directions at the site to upload your photos to your space on the site. This is where having the folder with your pictures comes in handy because they are easy to find on your computer using the browse menu provided by the site. After your photos are up loaded to your storage site each will be given a specific address. They might look something like this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v377/trainnut1250/roomview2.jpg You will want to make a list of these addresses by using the cut and paste feature in your browser or by writing them down by hand (terribly old fashioned). 3. Posting to the forum. Armed with your addresses you might want to post a photo. To do this we need a special code to tell the forum to go get your photo this is usually the [IMG] [IMG] symbols. Always use the tags provided by the forum tool when posting photos. The address of the picture goes between the symbols like this: original photo web address: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v377/trainnut1250/roomview2.jpg forum photo address with tags (I altered these tags so you could see them): [IMG]http://img.photobucket. com/albums/v377/trainnut1250/roomview2.jpg[/IMG The forum viewer won’t see the tags or the address, the computer will read them and go get the photo. Different forums may have different ways of linking or tagging photos, but the principle is the same. Note: photo addresses and tags are very sensitive, if there are any errors at all, they won’t work. I recommend learning to use the cut and paste feature for addresses to avoid exasperating errors. Most people who have problems with photos are messing up the addresses. That’s it!! Please post questions you might have. I hope that the above has been helpful. Maybe we will see some inspiring photos of your work on the forum soon. If you have corrections or suggestions on how to improve this explanation please post them. I posted the same explanation over on the Atlas site as well. Guy
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