Funny pictures.

How to Make Images Work Here

WDS said:

Bleh sorry people. Pictures are not working and I dunno whats wrong. I keep getting error messages. Now how do I delete this so people don't continue to waste time on it?

Click to expand...

Detailed how-to from Galoot, who I haven't seen in, like, forever:

I don't use AW's storage space. I've got nothing against it, but I like saving Jenna a few bucks. If everyone uploads a 50kb picture and then posts it to a thread, and hundreds of people read the thread, Jenna's just paid for umpteen megabytes of data being downloaded from the AW servers. Remember, AW gets over a million hits a month.

I like places like ImageShack.us. You can upload pictures from your hard drive to theirs, then display the pictures in the AW forums (or E-Bay, or your home page, or wherever). It's free. ImageShack encourages it. (Other sites don't, so don't steal their bandwidth.)

I don't know anything about the fancy Message Editor Interface down there. I switched it to bare-bones basic in my settings the day I joined up. All those doohickeys take too much time to load when all I want to do is write a short post. (Hey, it could happen that I'm brief!)

I know this much: whether you use the fancy interface or the plain one, the code to display images is the same. You can use the nice interface and still follow along with these examples.

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Posting images and shrinking AW's bandwidth bill:

1) Find an image you like on the net (get permission to use it if it's not in the public domain) or use an image of your own.

2) Save it to your computer. On the web, right-clicking your mouse on the image should pop up a menu, one of the choices being "Save Image As..." or something close. Save it in a place you can find it. I use the "C:\TempCrap" directory, and just delete everything in there once a week or so.

3) Go to ImageShack [that’s imageshack.us, NOT imageshack.com] and click the "Choose" button there. A window will pop up in which you can navigate your own hard drive. Do that and find the place where you stored your image. Select your image, then click OKAY or OPEN or whatever your operating system tells you when you're on the right track.

The image's location on your hard drive will now be shown in the text box to the left of that "Choose" button.

4) Click the "Host it!" button at ImageShack. Your computer will upload the image to their server. If it's a small image, go to step 5. If it's a large image, skip ahead to step 6.

5) a) If it's a small image you'll be brought to a page with a bunch of code on it. Select the code on the line that reads "Direct link to image" and copy it to your clipboard using CTRL-C.

b) In your AW message, type this:

Replace "PASTE THE CODE HERE" with the code you copied in the last step. Use CTRL-V.

c) You're done. Here's what it looks like with the sample image I used: [shows an image]

6) a) If it's a large image you'll be brought to a page with a bunch of code on it, and a small thumbnail version of your image. Select the code on the line that reads "Thumbnail for forums (1)" and copy it to your clipboard using CTRL-C.

b) In your AW message, paste the code you just copied into your message using CTRL-V. Like this:

c) When you post, you'll see a thumbnail image in your message that people can click on to see a larger version if they want. The little black bar at the bottom shows how big the full-sized version is. People with slow connections won't have to download the big image unless they want to.

You're done. Here's what it will look like:

Look at this poor confused snake! [he has a cute pic here]

Click on it if you want to see the big version. (Then say, "Ooo, that's neat, Galoot. Did you make that?" And I'll say, "Why yes, I did. Aren't I great?")

Maryn, who can copy and paste with the best of them