Bruce N H wrote:Hey all,
A few notes on posting images in the forums, since we've had a number of new members recently.
Please don't post images over 400 pixels wide or high in the forums. It messes up the forum formatting and slows things down for people without high-speed connections. If you do post over-large images, an admin or mod will generally remove them from your post.
If you want to edit your images (and you should), you can certainly use any software that came with your camera, something like Photoshop, or the free program Gimp. Kevin wrote a great
article about how to download and use Gimp.
To post an image in the forums, it has to be already hosted somewhere on-line. Two common free services are Brickshelf and Flickr. Some details about each of these services is found below.
The proper syntax for posting an image is as follows (remove the asterixes):
[*img]
http://www.imageaddress.jpg[*/img]
If you wish the make the image a clickable link, the syntax is as follows (again, remove the asterixes):
[*url=
http://www.websiteaddress.com][*img]
http://www.imageaddress.jpg[*/img][*/url]
If you include an image in your sig line, it should be 100 pixels high by 400 pixels wide, or less.
Brickshelf
You can sign up for a free Brickshelf account
here. When you first post something to Brickshelf, it is not immediately visible to the public until Kevin (owner and moderator of Brickshelf) okays it. This is to prevent someone from posting inappropriate content. Usually it will become public within a few hours. In the meantime you could wait to post the link in our forums, or you could post a deeplink. To find the deeplink address, keep clicking on the image on Brickshelf until you see only the image, with no border of Brickshelf banner. The address should end in ".jpg" or ".gif" rather than "cgi=?i########". For comparison, this is a deeplink:
http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/brick ... et6085.jpg
This is not:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=3210579
You might also want to post thumbnails in your post. Brickshelf automatically creates thumbnails when you upload images. When you are looking at the page of thumbnails (
e.g. this), right-click (or control-click for you Mac users) on an image to get the address of the thumbnail. It should end in "_thumb.jpg", like this:
http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/brick ... _thumb.jpg
Flickr
You can sign up for a free Flickr account
here. You can also pay to get enhanced features on your account. Unlike Brickshelf, Flickr is not exclusively LEGO, but it does have a lot of additional features like the ability to comment on photos or create user groups. I'll leave any further comment on the relative merits of these two sites to others. One nice aspect of Flickr is that it automatically creates several different image sizes for you. When you upload an image to Flickr,
such as this, you'll notice a little icon above the photo saying "all sizes". This takes you to
a page that offers you different choices. This makes it easy to choose an image that is
smaller than the 400 pixel limit for the forums. To get the address of the image, right click (or control-click) the picture and copy the image address. It should look something like this:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/231/4530 ... 2aee_m.jpg
When posting images to Flickr, it is helpful if you added a "LEGO" tag, as this will help other LEGO fans to find your images among the other Flickr content.
Other image hosting sites
In addition to these two sites, there are a number of other image hosting sites you can use. I won't go into any additional detail on these.
Exclusively LEGO sites:
MOCpages,
YouBrick,
MOCshow,
Brickery,
BrickImage,
MyImages (1000Steine members)
General image hosting:
Maj,
PhotoBucket,
ImageShack
Bruce