Posting pics

[Marc]

With the new software STF can finally host pictures, rather than you needing to host them remotely at someplace like PhotoBucket and furnish links to them in your post; Photobucket is now charging a stiff fee for remote hosting but there are other sites that are still free of charge. When making a post, choose "Full Editor", then scroll down and you'll find a file attachment feature which you can use to upload a picture (any file, actually) to the STF server. If the picture displays so large that it's necessary to scroll to view it, you might want to resize it (≤800x600 suggested) before attaching.
It's obvious that STF's storage space requirement will increase as use of this feature catches on, so please don't overdo it.

You can still post links to remote picture-hosting sites as before, so if you've got an account at a reliable one I encourage you to continue to use it. Merely posting the link to the picture won't make it display in your post (readers will need to click on the link to see it)...In order to make a remotely-hosted picture to display in your post, follow the link with [/img] and precede it with [img].

Personally I expect to only use the local-hosting feature for pictures which I feel are "important" - those which clarify an issue better than words can, and I don't want to risk them becoming unavailable should a remote hosting site go down.
It's recommended that you resize your photos to ≤800x600 before uploading them to your hosting site, so they won't be huge on screen when displayed at STF.

On a related subject, I've noticed that many folks will "quote" an entire post in order to reply to it. Unnecessary duplication of text also nibbles away at server space, so please take a moment to trim down the quotation - leave just enough of it to make it clear what your response is to. Duplicating photos won't impact server space much (the photo's only stored once, regardless of how many times it's invoked) but it's annoying to have to scroll past the same pictures over and over when trying to follow a thread.

If you have Microsoft Photo Viewer on your computer, it makes cropping and resizing pictures a breeze. Newer versions of Microsoft Paint also can resize most picture files. Here's a web site that you can use to resize pictures online: http://www.shrinkpictures.com/

Lately I've been using ObviousIdea's "Light Image Resizer" - the free version makes you wait for 20 seconds before you can use it and requires clicking off some advertising, but for occasional use it's a capable program, able to dramatically reduce the size of picture files with no noticeable loss of detail (great for sending photos in emails) and you can't beat the price: http://www.obviousidea.com/windows-soft ... e-resizer/

Note that if you reorganize your remotely hosted pictures (say, by creating albums to group them logically) any links you've created to their original locations will be broken, you'll need to hunt those posts down and edit them to reflect the new locations.

[rrb6699]

on a similar note for smartphones an app called "Reduce Photo Size" has a selection for 640 480 or smaller. very easy.

[GoMopar440]

I use "IrfanView" for resizing pics before uploading them to Photobucket. It's free, easy to use and has a bunch more options than MS Paint or MS Photo Viewer. I leave the originals full size on my memory card so I can get the big pics back later if I need to. Of course I'm using either 32 or 64 GB memory cards so they'll hold a LOT of huge pics.

Here's a link if anyone wants to check it out. http://www.irfanview.com/

[Marc]

"Light Image Resizer" which I mentioned above is another freeware program that works well; the free version imposes a short delay, but it's not objectionable for occasional use.
http://www.obviousidea.com/windows-soft ... e-resizer/

[mads b (dk)]

Why not just bring STF upto date and allow bigger pictures.... come on

Samsung S5 Tapatalk

[Marc]

Why not just bring STF upto date and allow bigger pictures.... come on

The problem there is that when you modify phpBB code, it doesn't always carry over with upgrades - and vice-versa. Doc doesn't have the savvy to deal with this personally, or the budget to keep a specialist on staff to do so. There's a "butterfly effect", seemingly minor tweaks can cause unanticipated bugs elsewhere.


Since it's no big deal to have photos hosted elsewhere and just link to them (rather than have them take up space on STF's server)....."come on" and expend a little effort yourself rather than bitch about it. It's not as though STF is generating big bucks from advertising.

[1965mt]

this is a sketch of what I have measured,

http://images.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/1534672.jpg

[rrb6699]

I have to reduce images to 100x100 still. if not, I get an "image too large" error. on my last post I could see pixelating at 100x100.

I know what you mean by butterfly effects, but, as a software developer the parameters should be read in from a text file for things such as maximum image size, etc... that way you don't have to make code changes and recompile/build program(s) to adjust things like photo size.