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Hello friends
I have seen some members having issues with sharing photos on the forum. I want to share a walk-through of how I manage and share my photos on the WWW. I am not a software person so please excuse any incorrect explanations of my working knowledge.
Theory
At the fundamental level, if you want to share a photo on the internet from your local hard drive, it needs to be hosted somewhere online. Typically you upload an image from your device or computer to a hosting service, and then you are able to embed that image on other websites (such as in your forum post). When you embed the image in your thread, you use a string of HTML code (friendliness of the interface depends on the platform that the forum runs on) to "point" to your image back on your hosted location. The website where you have uploaded the image delivers the image when a user loads the forum thread.
There are a variety of ways to host photos online, and many have come and gone through the years. The arrival of cloud photo storage has also made it possible to back up and share photos, but typically in a less public way. If you use iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. and try to embed photos that way, it is often the case that these are private files associated with your account and will not show up for the strangers of the internet. Annoyingly, they might look perfectly normal on your screen, where you are logged in as yourself. For this reason I generally do not recommend cloud-storage options.
Photobucket killed forums (skip if you just want to learn how to use Flickr)
In ye olde days, I used to host my images on Photobucket. Upload them there, embed them in my posts. But as you can imagine, hosting all of this data is not free, and as a result all services have a "free" tier with restrictions and then paid options without restrictions.
In the case of Photobucket, one day in mid-2017 they decided to completely turn off all embedding of their images. Instead of a nice build thread, you got dozens of repeats of this image:
You might remember this, or the image of the sad kitten, which they also used. From that day on, Photobucket required a $400/year subscription to host and embed photos. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that this, in conjunction with the rise of Facebook at the same time with its much easier photo-hosting-posting interface, is a huge reason why forums died out.
Flickr and why I like it
Anyway, after Photobucket made itself a non-option for me, I started sharing my images using Flickr. I was initially drawn because Flickr was completely free and I could log in with my Yahoo account, no new account required. There are a lot of hosting options out there, but these are the reasons I use Flickr:
3. On the next screen, click the big button to navigate your computer folders, or just drag and drop the image of interest. Add as many photos as you think your internet connection can handle.
4. You can adjust settings here including privacy and which album you want to add the image/s to. Privacy should be "public" if you want to embed it on the forum. Click "upload" in top-right.
5. Your photo should show up in your Photostream. Click on it for some additional options.
6. Now you're ready to embed your image in your forum post! In the bottom-right, click the arrow pointing to the right. A box will come up mid-screen with different sharing options. To embed in a forum post, you want to use BBCode. Click the drop-down and adjust the resolution you would like to use for the embedded image. I use "Large" with 1600 pixel width, as that seems to show up pretty well, at least on my devices.
7. Copy the blue string of text and paste it into your thread. It will show in your message composition as a string of text, but when you click "Preview" or "Post" it will call the image from Flickr and embed it.
Wow that's kind of a hassle
Yes... that is true. When you upload a photo to Facebook, they take all the work out of the process - they host it for you and make it easy to share immediately. The process of adding photos to your forum thread is more legwork, but with some practice the workflow comes pretty naturally.
Other things
DSC_6730 by Photos PK, on Flickr
Hopefully this is helpful to you and gives you the ability to share full-res photos with the forum. Again, this is a very "this is the way I do it" example and there are certainly other hosting platforms that may offer other benefits for your use case.
I have seen some members having issues with sharing photos on the forum. I want to share a walk-through of how I manage and share my photos on the WWW. I am not a software person so please excuse any incorrect explanations of my working knowledge.
Theory
At the fundamental level, if you want to share a photo on the internet from your local hard drive, it needs to be hosted somewhere online. Typically you upload an image from your device or computer to a hosting service, and then you are able to embed that image on other websites (such as in your forum post). When you embed the image in your thread, you use a string of HTML code (friendliness of the interface depends on the platform that the forum runs on) to "point" to your image back on your hosted location. The website where you have uploaded the image delivers the image when a user loads the forum thread.
There are a variety of ways to host photos online, and many have come and gone through the years. The arrival of cloud photo storage has also made it possible to back up and share photos, but typically in a less public way. If you use iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. and try to embed photos that way, it is often the case that these are private files associated with your account and will not show up for the strangers of the internet. Annoyingly, they might look perfectly normal on your screen, where you are logged in as yourself. For this reason I generally do not recommend cloud-storage options.
Photobucket killed forums (skip if you just want to learn how to use Flickr)
In ye olde days, I used to host my images on Photobucket. Upload them there, embed them in my posts. But as you can imagine, hosting all of this data is not free, and as a result all services have a "free" tier with restrictions and then paid options without restrictions.
In the case of Photobucket, one day in mid-2017 they decided to completely turn off all embedding of their images. Instead of a nice build thread, you got dozens of repeats of this image:
You might remember this, or the image of the sad kitten, which they also used. From that day on, Photobucket required a $400/year subscription to host and embed photos. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that this, in conjunction with the rise of Facebook at the same time with its much easier photo-hosting-posting interface, is a huge reason why forums died out.
Flickr and why I like it
Anyway, after Photobucket made itself a non-option for me, I started sharing my images using Flickr. I was initially drawn because Flickr was completely free and I could log in with my Yahoo account, no new account required. There are a lot of hosting options out there, but these are the reasons I use Flickr:
- It is free to host up to 1000 photos
- They do not reduce image quality on upload. FB, Insta, Photobucket all knock down your file size to reduce the amount of data they have to store and pay for. Flickr does not, which is non-negotiable when I am going through the effort of taking/editing good quality photos to share
- I find their interface and workflow pretty easy to navigate
- You can create albums and share them easily
- They have an App that allows you to upload stuff straight to your account from your phone if you so desire
- There are communities for all kinds of photography interests, including E30 M3 race cars and full-quality photos that I generally don't see anywhere else
- Head to https://flickr.com and sign up.
- To add your first image, find the icon in the right hand side of the top banner bar. It's a cloud with an arrow pointing upward through it. (yellow)
3. On the next screen, click the big button to navigate your computer folders, or just drag and drop the image of interest. Add as many photos as you think your internet connection can handle.
4. You can adjust settings here including privacy and which album you want to add the image/s to. Privacy should be "public" if you want to embed it on the forum. Click "upload" in top-right.
5. Your photo should show up in your Photostream. Click on it for some additional options.
6. Now you're ready to embed your image in your forum post! In the bottom-right, click the arrow pointing to the right. A box will come up mid-screen with different sharing options. To embed in a forum post, you want to use BBCode. Click the drop-down and adjust the resolution you would like to use for the embedded image. I use "Large" with 1600 pixel width, as that seems to show up pretty well, at least on my devices.
7. Copy the blue string of text and paste it into your thread. It will show in your message composition as a string of text, but when you click "Preview" or "Post" it will call the image from Flickr and embed it.
Wow that's kind of a hassle
Yes... that is true. When you upload a photo to Facebook, they take all the work out of the process - they host it for you and make it easy to share immediately. The process of adding photos to your forum thread is more legwork, but with some practice the workflow comes pretty naturally.
Other things
- If you'd like to share your photo at full resolution, for example if you took a nice photo of someone else's car, they can use the downward pointing arrow on the photo page to download at the resolution their heart desires. You can limit this capability if you don't want anyone on the internet downloading your stuff.
- If you want to delete a photo from Flickr, on the image page click the edit button in the bottom-right (pencil on paper) and select "delete."
- When embedding an image using the BBCode tool, it will copy two snippets of forum code. The first is an [IMG[ tag (typed incorrectly to avoid confusing the software in this post) wrapped in a [URL[ tag back to Flickr. With this mechanism, if someone reading clicks your image in the thread, the image itself is a link back to the Flickr hosting of the photo.
- The second snippet is a caption and link that I find pretty useless. I delete this in my posts. If you don't, images look like below with the caption still attached.
DSC_6730 by Photos PK, on FlickrHopefully this is helpful to you and gives you the ability to share full-res photos with the forum. Again, this is a very "this is the way I do it" example and there are certainly other hosting platforms that may offer other benefits for your use case.
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