howto Photos and Attachments

[bradl]

The old "inserting pictures into posts"  and "insert attachments" topics have become obsolete with newer versions of the forum software so here's a quick rundown of several ways you can get attachments — usually photos — into posts. 

I have a photo on my desktop

If you have an appropriately sized photo on your desktop the simplest way to upload it is to just drag it onto the attachment manager (anywhere in the shaded attachment area). The attachment area will highlight when the image is over the appropriate area.

If you are using a tablet or something without a desktop you can use the 'choose files' link instead, then navigate your device to the photo location to select it for uploading.

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Tip: If there is a filesize limit it will be displayed near the paperclip attachment icon. Be sure the filesize of the image you are uploading is smaller than the limit (you'll get an error message if your image is too big). How big is my photo?

Spoiler

Posting a photo directly as it comes off a modern phone or camera is almost always too big: often 3000 pixels or larger wide. Even if the camera file fits the limit, you will use up your attachment space very fast with little benefit. IPhone image size by model.  

Some phones have a camera setting to store photos at a smaller size or lower resolution to save memory space. Cropping the photo on the phone before uploading can help. Camera apps are plentiful for IOS and Android phones and many include resizing functions. 

As a practical matter there is seldom a need to post an image larger than about 1024 pixels wide. Simple photos not needing a great amount of detail can often be effective at 450 or 800 pixels wide. A photo provided simply for reference can be effective as small as 150 pixels wide. See the separate topic about image hosting and file resizing; if you need help, ask in a new topic how to resize your photo. Someone will help you! 

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Wait for a moment while the photo uploads. Position your cursor where you want to see the photo, and then with your pointer click the (+) icon on the image in the attachment manager to insert the photo at the cursor location.

I clicked the insert (+) icon and here's my photo!

If you change your mind you can delete the image from the attachment manager by clicking the trashcan on the image.

Always use the trashcan icon to delete unwanted and unused attachments. Instead of backspacing over the preview image, click the trashcan and both the attachment and the preview will be deleted at once. If the attachment is still showing in the attachment manager it is still being counted as part of your attachment size limits and may even appear (unasked) in your post. To truly delete it use the trashcan icon to remove it from the attachment manager completely.

You can now either submit your post or continue to edit the text until you are happy.

If you accidentally delete the preview of the attachment, no worries, just put the cursor back where you want it and click the insert icon again. As long as the attachment is shown in the attachment manager section it can be inserted anywhere (or deleted).

Link Image to URL, Change Display Size, Align Left or Right

Link Image

A fairly common thing to do is to use a photo to link to a different web page. Think of nearly every web advertisement you have ever seen   You can do a similar thing with benign intent by setting a URL (web address) for your photo to link to.

This is optional. If you do nothing the photo will link to itself and simply pop up in its own window or perhaps display in a nice lightbox. But if you wanted your photo of an agility Cairn to link to an online article about that dog, you could copy the article URL and then set your photo to link to it. Here's how.

Double-click on the inserted image to bring up this dialog box:

Paste the URL of the article into the Link URL field and Update. Done!

Display Size

Note that you can also change the display size of the photo. Important: the original photo (no matter what its size) is still loaded and is not affected. Only the size of the display on-screen is affected. If your file is 1MB in filesize and 2040 pixels wide, changing it to 450 pixels wide will make it look smaller, but the full 1MB file is still being loaded and it's still using 1MB of your available attachment space. For this reason, the Size option is rarely used. It is very handy though if you want to use both a large version and a small version of the same image on the same page — you can upload the image once and then force one version to display smaller.

Alignment

If you have the desire to try some fancy formatting, you can also force your image to the right margin of your post by setting the alignment to Right. 

Reusing Attachments

If you want to use the same photo in more than one post you can save some attachment space by reusing a previous attachment rather than uploading copies of the same thing over and over again. To reuse an attachment use the Insert other media button, the choose Insert existing attachment.

Be sure to click the gray checkmark on the image you want to use so that it highlights a different color.Then click the insert Selected button to insert the image at the cursor location.

More than likely you will have more than one image to choose from   You can select more than one image to insert. If you have pages and pages of attachments to choose from, rather than scroll through the pages one by one you can search for parts of the photo filename to narrow down the search. 

Embed a Remote Image

Embedding or 'hotlinking' a remote image fetches the image from wherever it is on the Internet and inserts it into your post. To preserve your attachment space, this really the best option for using images in most posts for most people, using an image hosting service to store a nearly unlimited number of images, then embedding the image you want here when you want to share it in a post.

Important: the image must be in a publicly accessible place on the internet. The image cannot be on your own desktop as you are the only person who can access the image there! 

You can embed an image (without uploading an attachment) in two ways. Both ways require you know the URL of the image. I always test my URL by pasting it into the address bar of browser tab and verifying the image loads. Then I paste that tested URL in one of the ways shown below.

The simplest way is to just paste it into your post! If the image can be loaded it will be fetched and embedded automatically. Not all images will embed: the owner may prevent it from being 'hotlinked' or the image URL may be in a format the software cannot deal with directly. 

As if by magic, an image appears from the remote location.

If it doesn't work, try pasting the URL on its own line, followed by Enter.  (The same goes for youtube URLs.)

If it still doesn't work it may be for any number of reasons, the two most likely being the source site owner has prevented hotlinking by technical means or the URL is in a format the forum doesn't understand.

You can also do essentially the same thing by using the Insert other media button an choosing Insert image from URL.

A note about remote images.  There are some risks with embedding images.  The owner of the remote image may prevent you from embedding it using technical means,  delete it at some point in the future (leaving you with a broken image link) or worse, change it to something really embarrassing later (keeping the same filename so the image embeds as usual, only now it's a different image than you originally saw). 

Despite those risks, embedding a remote image is without doubt the fastest and easiest way to get a photo into your post. 

Have Fun

Images help a forum come to life. I hope some of this information helps you share some of yours with the community. If you want to practice, please use the Test Forum — your posts there are seen only by yourself and administrators so it's a safe place to experiment. When you get the result you like you then have the knowledge to recreate your public post in the appropriate forum.

Getting Help

If you need help working with images, please use this topic or start a new topic here in Forum Support.

[Hillscreek]

Can  I put pic in Bark Box? If so how?

[bradl]

Not as an attachment.  BUT … if the photo is on the web somewhere and you have the direct URL to the image you can paste the URL of the image and the chat box ("bark box")  will (usually) fetch the image and render it *after* you hit enter. 

[Hillscreek]

Thanks Brad