How to Post Images

[West Coast Birder]

There are two basic ways to post images on Focus on Photography.

1. External Hosting: Host you image external to Focus on Photography (for example, at Flickr, 500px, Smugmug, etc.) and embed the image in your post use a BBCode hotlink
   
   
2. Hosting on FoP Server: Upload your image to the FoP Forum server and attach/insert it in your post

External Hosting:

All external sites will provide the ability to link to your image using img tags. Cut and paste this string (including the img delimiters in square brackets) into your post and your image will be embedded/hotlinked and will display in the post.

The advantage of this embedding/hotlinking method is that the photos reside exclusively in your external account and is merely being displayed on the forum post on demand.

The disadvantage of this method is that the EXIF information of the photo will not automatically be displayed under the photograph. This only happens with method 2 where you upload the image to the forum server. You can still view the EXIF data through EXIF viewer plugins that are available for most browsers.

Hosting on FoP Server:

The advantage of hosting your image on the forum server is that the forum software has an add-on that reads the EXIF information in the photograph and writes it into the post under the photograph. This is therefore a convenient way of displaying the EXIF information without the need for browser plugins.
To host the image on the forum server and display it in your image, you can

a) either directly upload a photo from your device (computer hard drive, phone, etc.) into the post you are making, or

b) upload it first to the media gallery and then link to it in your post.

a. Uploading directly into your post:

There are 2 ways to directly upload images to your post.

i. Clicking the little icon in the menu of the text editor shown below:



You will be presented with a dialog to upload your image from your device into your post. The image will be displayed at its full resolution. Please note that forum rules require the longer dimension to be a maximum of 1600 pixels.

ii. You can simply drag an image from your desktop/folder and drop it in the text editor. With this method you are given tools to resize your photo by simply dragging one of the corners.

If you upload an image directly into your post, it also simultaneously places the image in your Media Gallery. This is useful if you want to use the same image in a second post in a different thread and do not want to upload it again.

b. Uploading first to the media gallery and then linking to your post:

This will be described in Post 2 in this thread.

 

[West Coast Birder]

b. Uploading first to the Media Gallery and then linking to your post:

To get to the Media Gallery, click on the Gallery button at the top of the page, shown as Step 1 in the screen capture below. Then, Step 2 is to upload your image to the Media Gallery by clicking on the Add Media button on the right side of the page as shown.



Once your image is in the gallery, hover your mouse over the thumbnail of the photo you wish to include in your post. You will see a black band at the bottom of the thumbnail showing the file name, your name, etc. This is shown in the red oval in the screen grab below.



Click on the name of the file in the top row of the black band, marked in the green oval. Do not click on your name or the date in the second line.




Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and at the bottom right hand corner, you will be presented with a list of links to your photo as shown in the graphic below. Copy the Image BBCode link (circled) and place it in your post to display your image.



Note that once you have the image in your Media Gallery, you can use the BBCode as shown above in multiple threads without having to upload the image from your computer multiple times. This saves on time and forum server memory storage costs.