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How do I add images to the forums?

Cat: Main >> >> How do I add images to the forums?

Question
·  Where can I host my image?
·  How can I add images to the forums?
·  For gallery uploads, why do I have fewer upload directories to choose from than before?
·  How do you delete images from your member gallery
·  How do I sort the albums in my personal gallery area?
·  All of my photos are in my gallery, but I would like to make albums. Is there a way I can move my existing photos to albums?
·  Why do some images in the Forums show up as red X's?

Answer
·  Where can I host my image?

To display your images in our forum your image needs to be published to a Web server on the Internet. Luckily as a registered user (you are registered right?) you have up to 3 megabytes of space here on Armorama to host your images. Below your posts there is a "My Gallery" button. Click this button and you will be taken to your default gallery. From there you can do several things:

Help! My image is too big!
If you try to upload an image and get a warning message that the image exceeds the maximum file size, you will need to look at reformatting the image so that it doesn't exceed this size level. The easiest way to do this is via any photo editing program. Try opening the image and resizing the image to 800 pixels in width. Save as a .jpg format file. If the file is still too large try resizing to 600 pixels in width. If you still cannot meet the size limit then you will need to be able to save a .jpg file and control the compression level. Some photo editing application offer this setting and some do not. Consult your application manual or help files to see what it says about JPG compression. If you are using a digital camera you can also control the compression level on some models. This may result in a file that is much easier to simply upload to the site without having to use a photo editing program. For more info about JPG compression we have this article.

Upload Photos - To upload a photo (or photos) simply click on the Upload Photos text in the far upper right of your screen. The following page will allow you to select a category (see next section for more on categories) and browse to image files on your PC to select them for upload. Once you select a photo and click submit you will move to a page that will allow you to enter info about this image. This is optional of course but entering a description and keywords will make it easier for members to find your photo when doing a search.

Create Member Albums - If you would like to organize your images you can create sub-categories within your gallery. Simply click on the Album Admin link on the top left of the your gallery page and select Add Album. It is very important to create a new album if you would like to submit a large group of photos for inclusion in the main gallery. This will allow us to easily grab all the photos in that album and move them at once to a new category location.

My Favorites - The my favorites function allows you to ear-mark images that you would like to be able to quickly find again from your gallery page.

If at some point you out-grow your gallery space you can opt to join the Armorama Guard.

Other Hosting Options

There are numerous image hosting options available to you. Many times your ISP will offer web space as part of your account. Utilizing this type of space might require an FTP application and this is sometimes more than some users want to deal with. Basically an FTP client allows you to move files from your PC to a Web server on the Internet. Here are a SELECTION of downloadable FTP clients from C-net.

AOL users also have free space on their accounts. See keyword "MYFTP" for more info.

There are other free options available out there. Here are a few:

Photobucket.com
Get a gob of free upload space and a pretty easy to manage gallery system as well.

Yahoo Photos
Remember to change your album so that it's viewable to outside users.

Yahoo Geocities
There is still a free option there if you look hard.

Webshots

These are just a few of the more popular providers. Many more are out there.

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·  How can I add images to the forums?

There are several ways to add images to the forums. All of them require the image to be "hosted" somewhere on the Internet. See the previous question for more about this. For those who have images hosted and would like to display them, here are the options:

1.) BBCODE - This is the simplest way to show images in the forum. You can use the buttons provided to insert the tags for your image into your post. Clicking on the IMG button you will see this:

[img]http://put.url.here/image.file[/img]

Now all you need do is insert your image location where the text says "put.url.here/image.file". So as an example if you have images on your space at AOL then it would read:

[img]http://members.aol.com/your_screen_name/image_name.file[/img]

Note that ".file" will be one of the typical image file extensions for most browsers. That being .gif, .jpg, .bmp, .png, etc.

Some of the disadvantages of BBCODE are that you cannot control the size of the image. For that we would use HTML.

2.) HTML/IMAGE - For HTML image calls you must be a little more careful in typing out the full HTML code. For the above example it would look something like this:

<img src="http://members.aol.com/your_screen_name/image_name.file">

If you want to control the width of the image (so it doesn't spill off the screen you can add this:

<img src="http://members.aol.com/your_screen_name/image_name.file" width="600">

3.) HTML/LINK - For those who may want to conserve on the bandwidth of their site by not displaying the image, but rather just showing a link to the image, here is the HTML code for that:

<a href="http://members.aol.com/your_screen_name/image_name.file" target="_blank">

Note we have added a function (target=) to open a new window so the user will still remain on Armorama. Useful if you want to get feedback later and not get the user lost.

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·  For gallery uploads, why do I have fewer upload directories to choose from than before?

We had mistakenly been setting some categories as public upload galleries and this was corrected recently. The net effect is that yes, there are fewer locations you can put your personal images. But the benefit is that your list of categories is not several hundred long either. We are still interested in hosting quality images in the "categorized" galleries, we just ask that you submit these photos using the Support Center (http://support.armorama.com).

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·  How do you delete images from your member gallery

When you are on the full-size photo page, click the EDIT PHOTO link. At the bottom of the next page you will see a checkbox to DELETE. Check and hit submit.

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·  How do I sort the albums in my personal gallery area?

The default setting is to sort images by title. So provided you name the images in some way that is alphabetical, then they wil display in the order you would prefer. For example 1:, 2:, 3:, etc.

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·  All of my photos are in my gallery, but I would like to make albums. Is there a way I can move my existing photos to albums?

You can create albums by clicking on the "Album Admin" link in the gallery (upper left). Once you create an album you can edit your existing pictures and change the image location to the album in question. Please keep in mind that ALL of your images show up in your root gallery no matter WHERE they are additionally displayed in the gallery itself.

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·  Why do some images in the Forums show up as red X's?

This can happen for several reasons; The HTML or BB code used in the post is not correct to display the image. The image is no longer hosted where the user originally had referenced it. The image is hosted in a member-only area like Yahoo so that some people who are logged in with a Yahoo cookie can see the image and others would not. The image is visable to the user who posted it but not to others (for similar reasons to the last scenario). The user has exceeded his bandwidth were the image is hosted. There are many more explanations but generally it is safe to recommend that you host images in a location that all users can access. Our own gallery is good for this.

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