I’ve noticed recently that some people are doing what is in the image business is called “hot linking” to a picture. Hot linking means you aren’t loading a picture to an image hoster, instead you’re linking directly to where ever that particular picture is sitting and that by internet law is illegal. The main reason is when you hot link to another website you’re stealing the bandwidth (amount of data transfer that a picture requires) from the person that owns the picture. When an illegal hot link is made, a report is generated and sent to the server owner, which shows where the copied picture is being shown. In turn the server company will then file a criminal complaint or a lawsuit on the person or company to cease and desist using that particular picture because of both bandwidth theft and possible copyright violations.

To use a picture legally is actually very simple. It requires the use of an image hoster, which is a company whose sole business is to ‘host pictures’ and provide the ‘url’ for a specific picture to people & businesses that wish to show a picture on a website, blog, message board, and forums. I’ll use Photobucket here in this tutorial because they have free space but you may use whatever image hosting company you are familiar with.

Now, the simplest way to show a picture on the Midwest Center’s forum.

1. Go to http://www.photobucket.com and click Join (right side of the page) if you aren’t already a member.

2. Once you are signed up, with a userid & password, go back and log into the website.

3. The Upload Picture page will come up first. Here you will use the Browse button to find the picture on your hard drive that you want to upload to the photobucket server.

4. Once you’ve found the picture you want to upload, double click it and it will be saved in the box next to where the Browse button used to be. A thumbnail (small picture) is shown to the left of that box as well as the name of the picture which is located above it.

5. You may upload as many as 20 pictures at once but for now we are only going to do 1.

6. When you have the picture that you want to use loaded into the photobucket box click Upload and the picture will have transferred from your computer to their server.

7. After the picture has been uploaded successfully to their server a page will come up which shows the picture and four (4) url choices. You want to select the bottom one for a message board like this one: (and this is one of my actual working pictures)

[ IMG]http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p86/graphixart/pic1042.gif[/IMG ]

8. Copy the url of your picture over to the Midwest Center’s forum thread that you want to place the picture on and paste it to the reply box (same box that you use to put a text reply into) then click reply.

9. Note: How do I Copy & Paste? To copy a url, place your mouse cursor over the the picture url and left click your mouse. The entire url will highlight at once. Now right click the mouse and from the menu select “copy”. Now the picture url has been copied to your clipboard. Take that copied url over to the Midwest Center’s reply box and “paste” it into place. To “Paste” open up the reply box, place the mouse cursor in it, right click the mouse and select “paste”. This will put the url to your picture which is housed on Photobucket into the reply box, looking like this:

[ IMG]http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p86/graphixart/pic1042.gif[/IMG ]

Either above or below the picture you can add text to the message the same as you do on a normal basis. Just make sure if you put the text on top that you click “enter” after the last line of your response because that will insert a line break between your text and your picture.

10. Click Post Now and if everything was done correctly from above the picture will show on your post. If you get a Red X in a square then the url is wrong or the picture wasn’t uploaded to Photobucket correctly. Log back into Photobucket and re copy the picture’s url and paste it into your response on the MWC site again.

Here is the picture that we’ve been testing using Photo Bucket as an image hoster.




Now you can share your pictures with friends when you like.

[IMG][/IMG]

JUST PRACTICING, LOL

Your PUPIL/STUDENT,

Lenore

Gm Lenore, another way to put a picture on is to use an image tag (html talk) by take the picture url and adding img src in front of it, like this:

< img src="http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z210/lenore1997/thank-you.gif" >

This is the way I put every picture on here instead of doing it as above because it's a faster method for me personally.

All you have to do using the image tag above is close up the bracket on the left & right side by one space - had to leave it open to show what the img src tag looked like.

This is what you'd get:



If you do it this way remember to put a space between img & src, brackets on the left and right side of the complete url, and quotes areound the url also.

Hey David,

Thanks for the input. Wasn't sure myself how to do it. Never tried before. This is a test, this is only a test, do not adjust your screen, as this is only a test....

The reason I live......



Thanks again, Jim

p.s. Sorry, didn't realize this pic was that big.

LOL, OK OK PROFESSOR - pupil is practicing thks a bunch

LENORE

Great job Lenore & Jim! See not as hard as you thought it was.

Ok soon I'll show you how to resize a picture so it fits a page without stretching the screen from here to Cleveland. We can do it with editing programs or by inserting some words into the img src tag line which will auto resize a picture on demand.

Let's get used to posting pictures first then next week will do the resize bit.

For now, all of you use this thread as a test area and have fun!

Jim, here is your picture cropped, compressed, and resized a little to fit the page. One of the programs I use is a graphics program called Lview Pro to accomplish this move:

Hey David i cant wait to learn how to resize and actually make them bigger cuz I NEEEDDD it for the picnic. Thanks!!

P.S. I use photobucket if that will help you to teach me how to make em bigger.