Posting pics
Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 12:44 pm
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.
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.
