Quick guide to posting pictures on the Forum:

Please Note: While the guide below is quite detailed, in practice, following it through is not laborious, or for that matter, time-consuming. Once the process is completed, repeating it can take as little as a few minutes.

To include pictures in your forum posts, a basic understanding of HTML will be useful but is not at all necessary.

HTML tags can be used when posting messages on the forum to format the text of your entry. If you would like to learn more about HTML tags and how to use them, visit the Getting started with HTML guide for an excellent and quick introduction that will cover the basics you will find useful for posting messages on the forum.

The following guide explains how to include pictures on the forum with your posts.

I have assumed in this guide that a picture has been pre-prepared and has been saved in the .jpeg format on your computer in a place you can easily find (a specific folder for example).

Before following the steps below, I’d recommend opening separate Internet Explorer windows for your forum post and for uploading the images. If you do not do this, you may lose the text of your post if the image upload window opens in place of your forum post window.

To open multiple Internet Explorer windows, simply double click the Internet Explorer icon again after you have already opened an existing Internet Explorer window. You can do this as many times as you like to open as many separate windows as are needed. This is useful if you want to open different websites at the same time and switch between the them.

Step 1

Open up (load) Internet Explorer and load the following website:

http://imageshack.us/

(Clicking the above link should open up that link in a separate window)

On the page that loads, you should see something that resembles the following:

Step 2

In the top part of the form, click the “Browse” button and select the picture that you want to include on the forum from the location you saved it to on your computer. Click the "Open" button, or double click the icon representing your saved picture:

Step 3

Put a tick in the “resize image?” tickbox and from the drop down-menu next to this, choose “640x480 (for message boards)”.

Now click the “host it!” button to begin uploading the picture.

Step 4

On the next page that should then load, there are a few links in different formats to the picture that you have just uploaded.

Look for the link labelled: “Hotlink for Websites”. This is highlighted in orange below:

Select the entire link in this field (usually just clicking it once will do this) and copy it into your forum post at a point in the text you want it to appear. (To copy text, select it with the mouse and then press and hold the "Ctrl" key on your keyboard and press the letter "C" while "Ctrl" is held down. This will copy the selected text and you can then release both keys)

This link can also be saved in a text editor or a word processor like Microsoft Word to be used later in the forums.

Step 5

The first part of the link: <a href="http://imageshack.us"> gives the picture link the title: “http://imageshack.us”.

To change the title of the link to something more specific (recommended), simply replace the text within the quotation marks with any text you choose:

For example:

<a href="http://imageshack.us">

Would become:

<a href="James 1st Double Crown">

Step 6

Once you have entered your text for the forum post and entered the link from the process described above in the appropriate part of your post, click the “Submit Article” button in the usual way to submit your post.

If you have any questions relating to this guide, please do get in touch either using our contact us form, or via telephone on (0161) 927 9524.