I decided to give a try at an explanation of web photo posting for other forum members who are interested in posting and haven’t had any experience with photos on the web. There are many points of view on this and I am trying to present a simple, straight-ahead explanation that is general enough to be understood and specific enough to be helpful.
First, a simple explanation of what happens when a photo is posted to the forum. Contrary to popular belief the photo is never actually stored on the forum. When a person views a photo in an online forum, the photo is sent from another web location (other than the forum) to the viewer’s computer. This means that in order to post photos in a forum they must be stored at another web site first. When pictures are stored at an online site, they are given a specific address. When a person posts the picture on the forum for others to view, he is actually giving the forum an address to the photo. The viewer’s computer uses this address to go out and get the photo.
The process of posting photos can be broken down into several categories:
- Taking and editing the photo
- setting up a web site to store photos and uploading them to the site
- linking to your photos by using the correct codes and language to have your pictures appear in a forum.
1. Taking and editing the photo.
We will presume that you have taken photos of your super cool model railroad with good lighting and clear focus. We need to talk about photo size. Most good, clear digital photos are too big for the web. Generally speaking the larger the size, the better the resolution.
Size is measured in image area: given as a dimension (400x600) and in total file size (256kb). We are interested mostly in total file size. Photos can now be as big as 3 or 4 megs (megabyte) with a garden variety digital camera. We want sizes to stay at around 100-150kb. A megabyte is 1,000 k