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IW Forum Picture Posting: An Illustrated Guide

NebraskaWhitetail

New Member
We are welcoming new members to the IowaWhitetail.com family on a daily basis and one of the first things a new member often wonders is "How do I get pictures into my posts on the forum?" For those who have been around the site and learned how to do it, picture posting is "old hat." But for a newcomer it's a little daunting.

So to help make the learning process a little easier, I decided to put together a little quick and dirty guide on picture posting and illustrate it with screen shots from a test case. Hopefully this will make the learning curve a little easier and less confusing for those who want to learn how to do it.

The first thing is to select a digital picture that you want to post. For purposes of this guide, we will assume that you have the image saved to your home computer. Here's our test picture:
3300Maryland_buck.jpg


One word of caution at this point: UBB Message Boards like IW seem to work best with JPEG images. If your image is a Bitmap (BMP) image, it will upload to the Gallery, but you won't be able to put it into a post. So for less headaches, whenever possible convert all photo images to JPEG format BEFORE uploading the images.

Ok, great. I've got the photo saved. Now how do I get it uploaded to my post in the forum?

Step 1: Getting the photo onto the internet.
The first step in getting a photo into a forum post is to get the photo uploaded to the internet. There are various ways to do this, but IW makes it easy by providing a Photo Gallery that you can upload for uploading pics.

Step 2: Finding the IW Gallery.
To get to the Gallery, look for the tabs near the top of every page and mouse over the one that says "Gallery". This will pop up a menu. From the menu, click on "Main Gallery":


3300Picture_Posting_02.jpg


Step 3: Uploading to the galleries.
Clicking on the "Main Gallery" link will take you to a page like this:


3300Picture_Posting_03.jpg


You can choose to upload your photo to any of the subgalleries on the page, but for the purposes of this guide, we will choose to upload the picture to the one labeled "My Gallery".

Step 4: Uploading to "My Gallery"
Your "My Gallery" page should look something like this:

3300Picture_Posting_03a.jpg


If you haven't uploaded any photos before, there won't be any pictures in the gallery. Don't panic. That's OK.

Step 5: Uploading the photo.
Now that you are in "My Gallery", it's time to upload the photo. Toward the upper right hand corner of the screen are some orange-colored links. One of these says "Upload Photo". Click on the "Upload Photo" link and it should take you to a new page. On this new page, you'll see a bunch of heading and blank boxes. These can be used to enter information about the photo that you are uploading. To actually upload the image, click the "Browse" button and your screen should look something like this:

3300Picture_Posting_04.jpg


Navigate to the folder on your computer where the photo is located, click once on the photo, and then hit the "Open" button. Your screen should now look something like this:

3300Picture_Posting_05.jpg


Notice that some information automatically appears in the "Photo to upload" box.

Fill if as much of the other infomation boxes as you want (you don't have to fill out any if you don't want to), and then click on the "Upload/Submit" button at the bottom. If all goes well, you should get a succesful photo upload screen that looks like this:

3300Picture_Posting_05a.jpg


If you wait a couple of seconds, this screen will automatically take you to the new page with the uploaded photo, and it should look like this:

3300Picture_Posting_06.jpg


So our picture is now uploaded to the IW Gallery at this point, but we still need to get it from the Gallery and into a post. So what next?

Step 6: Getting the image location information.
In order to get the picture into a post, we need to be able to tell the computer where the picture is located of the internet. To do this, we need the URL address of the image. URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator" and is a reference or address to a resource on the Internet. To get the URL for our newly-uploaded picture, we right click on the image and select "Properties" from the menu like this:


3300Picture_Posting_07.jpg


A new box pops up when we click on properties and gives us information about the image like this:


3300Picture_Posting_08.jpg


The only info we are really interested in is the data that follows where it says "Location:". Highlight all of this information as shown above, right click again, and select "Copy". Doing this copies the image locatoin data and automatically saves it to your computer's clipboard. We'll retrieve this data again shortly when making the the post, but for now that's all you need to do. You can now exit the gallery and head back to the forums to make your post or reply.

Step 7: Starting a post or reply.
To get you picture into a post, you can either start a new post or make a reply to an existing thread. Either way you go about it, you'll be looking at a post-editing screen like this:

3300Picture_Posting_09.jpg


You can type your text into the editing box, and when you are ready to insert the picture, click the "Image" link.

Step 8: Pasting in the image location information.
Remember the picture location information we copied and saved back in the Gallery? Now it's time to put that info to use. After clicking the "Image" link, a box will pop up on the screen looking like this:

3300Picture_Posting_10.jpg


Right click in the box where it says "Enter the complete URL for the image you wish to display" and from the pop-up menu, select "Paste."

The image location information that we copied earlier should now appear in the box similar to this:

3300Picture_Posting_11.jpg


When it does, you can now click "OK."

Your text editing post should now look something like this:


3300Picture_Posting_12.jpg


Step 9: Completing the post.
We're almost done! The image is now linked into the text of your post. Finish up writing your post and when you are done, click the "Continue" button at the bottom of the page. If everything went well, you'll soon see your new post with the picture linked in just like this:

3300Picture_Posting_13.jpg


And that's all there is to it. At first glance this may seem like a lot of work, but once you do it a time or two, you'll get so fast at it that it will literally only take you a few seconds to do. Practice up and get ready share your photos with the rest of your IowaWhitetail.com friends! If you are still struggling to get your pictures into your posts, PM a moderator or a long-time member and don't be afaid to ask for help. Most of the members are ready and willing to assit.

[P.S. I hope that some Moderator is willing to make this tread a "sticky" so that it will always be readily available to folks who are interested in learning how to post pictures. - NW]
 
Dang, I think I could even post a picture now! Thanks for taking the time for us "challenged" folk.
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Hey, this is pretty much how he walked me through on posting a pic, now i don't have to send him 500 pm's to just post a pic. Thanks NW
 
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This sounds like a dumb ? but how do I get my avatar to come up?
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Any help would be appreciated.

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To load an avatar, click on "My Home" (one of the links at the top of every page). It will take you a a new screen and down near the bottom of that screen you will see a box called "Main Configuration". One of the lines in that box says "Personal Info" and at the end of the link is a clickable link that says "Edit". Click on edit and scroll down until you come to the part that says "Your Current Avatar". You can use those settings to upload an avatar, link one in from somewhere else on the internet, or use a stock avatar provided by IW. Give that a try and if you are still having difficulty, don't hesitate to let myself or someone else know.
 
For some reason I cant find my home page. I see home but thats not it. I have tried about everything to get my avator up. Can you help!!!!!
 
I'm trying to post some pictures my sheds, but when I go to the part after you select the picture from your computer and put it in the "browser" and then I click "submit/upload" a screen comes up that says "picture exceeds file size" or something like that, can anyone help me out?
 
Bricker your digital image is to large. I usually reduce mine to 450 X 600 pixels. I use Paint Shop Pro to adjust my images but I think Windows has built in software for this task. You will have trouble emailing large images as well, this is a good task to learn how to master. I alway save my original photo at full pixels size and also save any reduced images with the same file name simply followed by the word resized. This way if I ever want to send that image again I see the right file at a quik glance.
 
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