Newbie Help: How to host and post pictures - The Unofficial BMW M5 Messageboard (m5board.com)

greg · 27th May 2002, 23:21

To include a picture or pictures in your posts, you must have already uploaded your pictures from your hard disk to somewhere on the web. There are two solutions:

One is to use a photo hosting site that allows "indirect references". This means a page at BMWM5.com can include the URL of an image on the hosting site and it will be displayed. Unfortunately, many photo hosting sites (and unfortunately Yahoo and Hobbystage.net/bmw site are among them) won't allow their images to be displayed unless you send us to their site directly - i.e., the viewer must be at hobbystage.net, not bmwm5.com.) This is done to ensure that if you use their services, your friends have to look at the ads which support the site. The only photo hosting site I know that still allows these indirect references is webshots.com - and they may close this door soon too. Other board members may know of others that still work.

The other solution is to get a legitimate web hosting account. Prices have come way down, and even if you don't want to have your own web page, you can store images there and they will work here.

The simplest and lowest priced web hosting solutions I know of are from Geocities - affiliated with Yahoo. Check out this page. Their prices start at $4.95 a month for 25Mb of storage (a lot) and 5Gb of traffic per month.

To see what you can get for a little more $$, check out this page at Earthlink, which is a popular service provider.

Once your images are uploaded, you'll need to know the URL of the image you want to post, which you will use with an IMG tag (see below) when you write your post here. Note that the URL you include must be the URL of the image itself, not the URL of a web page on which it is displayed. You can usually discover the URL of an image you see on a web page as follows:

Internet Explorer on a PC: Right-click your mouse on the image and choose Properties. Find the URL in the Properties dialog and copy it to paste it here.
Internet Explorer on a Mac: Click-hold over the image and choose "Open Image in new window". Now copy the URL from the address bar and paste it here.
Netscape on a PC: help - I need someone to let me know the procedure for this
Netscape on a Mac: Click-hold over the image and choose "Copy this Image Location". The URL is now ready to paste into the IMG tag.

Once your images are hosted and you know the URL of the image, include them in your post as described here.

Please also review the guidelines for image posting in the Posting Etiquette thread.

Here's a URL for an image on my site: http://www.heumann.com/images/turn5_325.jpg - and here is what happens when I put that URL in an IMG tag:

atomic80 · 27th May 2002, 23:30

Great writeup, Greg. This should be a sticky.

greg · 27th May 2002, 23:38

Thanks, Jason - I've asked Gustav to use this to update the "announcement" thread which still recommends hobbystage.

Rezf · 27th May 2002, 23:45

Greg,
You're ALWAYS one step ahead of everyone else

Thank you for the post!

Wozzeck · 28th May 2002, 00:15

There are several tricks to get around common protections on tripod and others.. Should I share, greg?

atomic80 · 28th May 2002, 01:16

Quote:

Originally posted by Wozzeck
There are several tricks to get around common protections on tripod and others.. Should I share, greg?

By all means, please do!

1C00lVC · 28th May 2002, 02:52

Greg,

I was always wanted to start an FAQ for the forum. This is one of the most asked questions when someone joins. Once you feel it is ready and done, please let me know, and Ill post it in the tips n trick forum. It will also make me get my *** in gear to assemble the FAQ.