generation zero Posted March 13, 2009 Posted March 13, 2009 Quite often, the question is asked by new and old members alike, "How do I post photos to the forums?" The answer is simple, and complicated in its' simplicity: you don't. So how then are people posting all these lovely pictures of thier sweet guitars? REMOTE HOSTING! What is remote hosting, you ask? Here is my step by step tutorial explaining what it is, and how to use it effectively here on the Epiphone forums. Enjoy! Step 1: FIND A HOST This is the main important step in posting photos here on the Epi boards, because the board software does not allow for direct uploading of photos by users. That means that every picture you see here is actually hosted at another website, and linked to from the post. If you have your own hosting site, you're ahead of the curve... you may have a server set up somewhere, or you could have a hosting account for a website you run with a company like GoDaddy.com or somewhere else. More likely though, you do not, and are just a casual web surfer. In this case, you will need to upload your pictures to a site that allows remote linking of images. Fortunately, there are a number of sites like this, most of which are free to the end user, and funded by advertisements. Two very popular such sites are http://www.photobucket.com and my personal favorite, http://www.imageshack.us, which is the site I will use for this tutorial. Both of these sites allow you to set up a free account, and that gives you the ability to store images on thier site and retrieve them at any time. For quick posting though, I prefer image shack because they do not REQUIRE you to set up an account to host an image. I will walk you through posting an image without setting up an account on image shack... the procedure should be similar on photobucket or other sites, but this tutorial will give you a general idea of how posting images to Epiphone forum pages works. So, to follow along, open a new internet window and go to http://www.imageshack.us and let's get started! Step 2: UPLOAD YOUR IMAGE When you go to Image Shack, you will see the following page, or something similar. (They occasionally slightly redesign thier site, so these directions may end up becoming outdated. I will try to update as I notice their changes...) Click on the "browse" button, and the following window will pop up: At this point, you should navigate to and select the image you wish to post. While ImageShack does now give you the option to upload multiple images simultaneously, I prefer to do them one by one, as with a multiple upload, they make it harder to copy the links for each image separately... more on that later. Anyway, once you have found the image you wish to post, select it and click the "open" button. That will bring you to this screen: Click on the button that says "start upload!" and it will, surprisingly, start the upload. Amazing how that works, no? Now you will see a progress bar, like so: Once your upload is complete, you will see this screen: Step 3: COPY THE LINK Click the cursor anywhere in the box with the direct link in it, and it will highlight the link, like so: Once the link is highlighted, hold down the "ctrl" key and press the "c" key. This will copy the link to your clipboard for later use. This is why I say do one at a time, because if you had uploaded multiple images, at this point you would see a thumbnail gallery, and have to click another link to get the direct links, and then you can only copy all or none, you cannot copy each one individually. That makes posting the images a bit more difficult, IMO. Your mileage may vary, feel free to experiment. Regardless, now that you have your link copied, let's move on to the epi forum. Step 4: PASTE THE LINK I assume if you are reading this, you already know the basics of posting on the forum, so I will skip that part. If at this point you do not know how to make a post on the forum, I reccomend packing up your computer and returning it to the store where you bought it, and reinvest your money into something more useful to you, like more guitars, LOL. Anyway, once you have entered any text you want posted before the image, hit enter twice, to leave a blank line between your text and your image. Then, hold down the "ctrl" key and hit the "v" key, which will paste your link into your post. Step 5: ADD THE IMAGE TAGS Now, there is but one final step... you have to add the tags that tell the forum software that your link is an image you want displayed, and not a clickable link to a website. To do this, you could type them in manually, but the board offers a quick button to take care of this for you. Highlight the link with your cursor, and click on the button that looks like a mountain with the sun above it. Doing this will place the necessary tags around your link. If you did it properly, you should now see this: That's it! Now, add any text you want displayed after your image, or repeat the steps to add multiple images in the same post. When you're done, hit post, and voila! Posted images on the forum! See next post for the results of this tutorial!
generation zero Posted March 13, 2009 Author Posted March 13, 2009 This is how you insert an image into a post, after remote hosting at a site like imageshack:
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