How to post photos to the forum

Posting images to the forum has given members a little difficulty, so I have written a short tutorial on how to do it, and we can link to this tutorial when someone needs help.  Photos do brighten the place up quite nicely 

Firstly you need to host them somewhere.  I use Flickr because its free, and it gives you several different sizes to use on forums.  It even gives HTML for hot linking, but we will stay away from that for now.  I'm going to list two methods, the simple way for posting an image using the forum image tool, and a slightly more complex way using basic HTML which allows a clickable image to provide larger than 400 pixel sizes.

The easy method: 

The basic way is very simple.  Upload your image to Flickr (or any host of your choice) In Chrome, Safari and Firefox you can right click the image and click 'copy image address'.  In some versions of internet explorer you may need to right click, go to properties, then copy and paste the image url from there.

Once you have the image url, click the button on the Forum Body toolbar that looks like a tree (to the left of the font colour tool).  This will open the insert image dialogue.  Copy the URL in to the URL text box and your done!  There are a few other options like restraining image size, but the forum will automatic restrict the image size to 400 pixels wide anyway, so you can just ignore it all.

The slightly more complicated but more awesome method:

The Forum restrict image size (and rightly so)  to make life easier for browsing.  Not everyone wants to see a 12 megapixel image of your new granite chopping boards!  But its nice to have the option to show them off, this is where Flickr's Lightbox comes in.  I like to have a small clickable image which takes you to a larger image on a black background.  

First, copy and paste the tiny bit of HTML below in to a text editor, and upload your required images to Flickr.

Once you have uploaded  your image as before, select the image in normal view and then click the image again to view in Lightbox (a magnifying glass should show before you click the image).  Copy and paste the web address from your browser (not the image url) in to the red bit in the HTML link below.  Next, click the 'all sizes' button in the top right of the Lightbox.  Pick the smallest size that has a greater width than 400 pixels (as the forum will size to 400 pixels anyway) Medium 500 should do it.  You can use a smaller thumbnail if you like, but since we have 400 pixels to play with you may as well use them.  Once your have picked your size, right click on your image and click "copy image address" (as above, maybe different in IE).  Paste this text in place of the blue bit below

<em><a href=" Web Address of Lightbox "><img src="image address of thumbnail"/></a></em>

Completed it will look something like this:

<em><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zombiejohniecash/5030502614/in/photostream/lightbox/"><img src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4112/5030502614_6bd36d73de_z.jpg"/></a></em>

In the Body Text toolbar there will be a button marked HTML (between text colour and the smilee face).  Hit the HTML button and paste the completed text above in to the pop up.  This will give you a clickable link like the one below!

Hope this is useful to someone!