Say you want to add a pic to a post. First you have to find the pic.

Locating pics

You may have pics you have taken and want to upload to the board. If you took the pic, you will download it from your camera and the image will be on your hard drive. Then you will need to upload it to the Internet. If this is all you ever plan on doing, skip to the next section entitled "So now I have the pic on my hard drive". If you want to post other pics from the internet, please keep reading.

The internet is full of pictures, photos, images, whatever you want to call them. Say you find a pic you like. You can highlight the photo with your mouse, then right click your mouse and "save as" to save them to your hard drive. FYI, You might want to give these photos a name that means something to you.

A few warnings about images and the internet

1. STEALING BANDWIDTH- When you are posting an image, do not directly link it to a website unless it is your own. Use an image hosting service (more on these in the next section). If you do not it is called stealing bandwidth and it is theft. The person or company that hosts the site has to buy bandwidth from an internet service provider to host their site and images. If you link directly to their site, they end up paying to host the image on our board.This will not be tolerated here.

A word to the wise. Some systems detect when you try to steal bandwidth by linking directly to images. These systems will block the image and insert a different image which could be pornographic, nasty, or just plain gross or they will insert a message telling the world what an idiot you are. Please don't do this intentionally to be funny because it isn't.

2. Fair use- Most internet usage of pics is governed by a concept under US copyright laws called fair use. This means you are "generally" ok to post an image you found on the net if it falls under the terms of fair use and you aren't doing it for commercial purposes. I don't want to get into a drawn out legal discussion so google "fair use" if you want to learn more.

Rules of thumb:

-If you are taking a pic from another website or discussion forum, it cant hurt to ask their webmaster or the original poster of the photo if you have their permission to post it. Most people will give permission if you ask.

-If you are having trouble finding out who "owns" the image, you might want to attribute it to the website where you find it or put a link to the photo in your post.

-Most companies won't have a big problem with posting images of their products because it generates free advertising for them. If you are bashing their product, they might not be so happy.

So now I have the pic on my hard drive

Your best bet is to upload it to a image or file service like:

Imageshack
http://www.imageshack.us/

Photobucket
http://photobucket.com/

or Tinypic
http://tinypic.com/

There are probably more, but those are the ones that come to mind.

You will need to upload your image file to one of these services from your computer, each service might do this a little differently, but they are all pretty easy and they have tutorials to show you how. All you will need to do is sign up for an account and you can start using the service.

Now I have my pic uploaded and want to add it to a post.

1. When you are composing your post, go to the icon section up above.

2. There are two rows of icons. Look on the bottom row to find the image insert icon used to add images to the post. It will look like this


3. Click on the image insert icon and add the URL (web address of the image) in the pop-up box that appears then click OK.

Or

You could use the file attachment option and upload your photo straight from your hard drive to our server but, I prefer not to use this method as it uses up our bandwidth.

If you are still having problems, it may be a site issue and contact myself or another moderator.

Finally

If at this point you are still so lost that none of this is helping you, please consider getting one of those yellow "Internet for dummies" books,...seriously.

A big thank you to bmick325 for writing this tutorial.