I hope no one minds me doing a guide, but I see so many posts from people saying that they don't know how to post a picture, I felt it was worth doing.

How to Post a Picture on TZ-UK

There are three steps to posting a picture:
1. Take your picture, and transfer it to your PC. This is not covered by this guide. :)
2. Upload the image to a web host.
3. Link to the image in your TZ-UK forum post.


Uploading your image to a web host

There are many websites that will host/store pictures for you. Your choice of host makes no difference when you come to post your picture on the TZ-UK forum. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) is recommended by several forum users, but I have chosen to use Photobucket for this guide (as that's the hosting service I use and am most familiar with).

First, you need a Photobucket account. It's free, and this is how you get one:

1. Go to http://www.photobucket.com and click on the "join now" tab:



2. Put in a username and password of your choice, and click the "Next Step" button. Remember the username and password, as you'll need them the next time to want to upload a picture :D



3. Fill in the stuff on the next page. There's no confirmation step, so you can chose to be called Donald Duck if you wish. You will notice that I chose the name "Timefactors". When you've done all that, click the "I accept. Sign me up!" button.



4. You'll now go to a page where you can upload your picture(s). Click the browse button...



...navigate to the folder on your PC where you have your picture stored, and select it/double click it, and the image will be selected for upload to Photobucket.



In the following image, you can see that i have selected a picture called "Photobucket1.jpg". Photobucket has automatically created a folder in its hosting space called "Timefactors", where it will store any pictures that I upload. Note that the image has not been uploaded yet.



At this point, you can click another browse button to select further images to upload, or just proceed to the upload stage. You do this by clicking the "Upload" button.

After a short period as the image is uploaded, you will see the following screen, confirming the success of the upload:



Next, scroll down, and you'll see a thumbnail of the image you just uploaded:




Just below the image are some lines of HTML stuff. You're interested in the one called "IMG Code":



Left click anywhere in the text box next to the "IMG Code" label - i.e. the bit where you can see "http://i195.photobuc" in the picture. When you click, a little yellow box saying "Copied" will pop up. This means that you have stored the link to your picture in your PC's clipboard/memory.

Update: It doesn't always auto-copy any more. If it doesn't for you, do the following: Left click anywhere in the text box next to the "IMG Code" label - i.e. the bit where you can see "http://i195.photobuc" in the picture. The text in the box will be highlighted. Right click the mouse, and select "copy" from the pop-up menu.

That's the end of the section on image hosting - we have stored our image on a hosting site, copied its location, and can now move to the TZ-UK forum.


Posting an image on the TZ-UK forum

1. Start a new post, and type text up to the point where you want your picture. Paste the code you copied from Photobucket into your post. You should see something like [img]http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z47/Timefactors/TZ-UK2.jpg[/img ]. This is the web location of your picture, surrounded by [img ] and [/img ] code tags that tell the forum software what to do. It should look like this:




...and there you go. Finish typing your post. Insert any other images you wish to put in your post, and submit the post. It's a good idea to preview your post to make sure that it's all formatted correctly.


OK, that's the end of the guide. I hope it all makes sense. :D


One final comment is regarding the size of the pictures you post - don't post big ones, or they break the formatting of the forum. Please see this thread for details: http://www.tz-uk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=224. If you use Flickr to host your pictures, then sizing is done for you.



Edit: Thanks to magirus and vagabond for help with the use of the Photobucket IMG Code, and GeoffD for the Flickr recommendation.