It's quite straightforward posting images, but if you don't have a photo hosting account you will need to get one. I use Photobucket, because when I signed up they were offering unlimited picture storage, but there are other hosts such as Webshots and Picturetrail. Your ISP might even offer picture hosting. Some links:

Photobucket
Webshots
Picturetrail

If you want to look around further do a Google search using 'image hosting'.

Once you have an account set up you are ready to upload images. In order to maximise the number of images you can store it is best to re-size them before uploading, although your photo host may have an edit facility written into their software. There are several freeware image manipulation programmes that can be downloaded, such as Irfanview, Gimp and Paint.NET, that can be used to re-size images. You may find that you already own some manipulation software that came with your camera, worth checking out. Images are frequently speckled with 'noise' and manipulation software packages often have a noise reduction command, which is very useful. Images stored at a resolution of 800x600 pixels are perfectly satisfactory for internet viewing. I always 'save as' re-sized images because it is a good idea to retain a high res version of the image for future reference.

Follow the instructions provided by your photo host to upload images. It is a good idea to store images in whatever album structure that can be set up within your hosting account, much as you would store files in folders and a directory system on your computer. Once you have several hundred images stored, retrieval is much easier within some sort of logical system.

Once your images are stored on the host account they can be posted on forums. Forums such as this one do this by placing the image address within tags, there is an [IMG*] prefix and [/IMG*] suffix. If you know the image address, in order to place it in a post you can use the 'IMG' button in the forum text editor. Click 'IMG' once and this will insert the [IMG*] prefix into the editor. Type or paste the image address, click 'IMG' again and it will paste in the [/IMG*] suffix. When you make the post the image should be visible. NB: The tags in this post have an added * otherwise the forum software tries to read the text as image code.

Most hosts provide you with a shortcut that will copy the image address onto your computer clipboard complete with the tags. This can then be copied straight into the forum text editor and is a lot faster than adding tags as you type. For example in Photobucket:

Open up the image in Photobucket, it should look something like this:



Look for the IMG code, I've highlighted in red where it is. Simply click into the dialogue where you can see the code and it is copied onto your clipboard. Paste this into the forum text editor and your picture will be visible when you make the post. You should find that whatever photo hosting provider you choose that they will have a similar facility.

If you still find you have problems posting images, contact one of the admins and we will do our best to sort it out for you.

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