This section explains how to upload and create pictures in your posts. When images are placed in-line in a forum message we want to make sure that:

• these pictures are hosted on our own site, with reasonable sizes and limits on file size. This ensures that these pictures are always available when our server is
• these pictures are reasonable in display size (maximum dimension is 640 pixels, either horizontally or vertically)
• these pictures are less than 256K in size (but smaller is better) so that even dial-up modem visitors can see them in a reasonable amount of time.

Process for putting pictures in your post

The general process for putting pictures in your post is actually quite simple and not too dissimilar from the normal process most of you are familiar with today. For the sake of new users and in order to reach optimum quality some of these steps are repeated here. The general process, for which each step is described in detail, is as follows:

• edit the picture to reduce its size
• upload the picture in your post

Editing your picture

The typical photograph, taken with a digital camera, is between 2 and 6MB large. That is far too big to show in a forum message. Most people view forum messages on a screen either 800x600 or 1024x768 pixels. A universally applicable maximum display size for a picture is therefore to make the largest side (either vertical or horizontal, depending on picture orientation) 640 pixels. Frequently the other side will end up being 425 or 480 pixels, or something close to that. This is an excellent size for our forum. Just by doing this, picture size will be reduced dramatically. Use your favourite software to save your picture as a ".jpg" file, and verify its size. Sometimes you can do this in your editing package, sometimes you need to right-click on "Your computer" or "My Pictures" to verify that size. If it is over 256K you need to further reduce that size. The easiest way is to perform a "Save As..." operation on the original file, and then to select an Image quality of say 60% (or 6 out of 10) or smaller to reduce the size below 256K. The smaller the percentage, the better. Note that this jpg compression process typically leaves a better image than if you try to achieve the same result in another fashion. These operations can be performed using Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Editor, the GIMP and other packages. If you use Windows and need an excellent free-of-charge package, I recommend XnView. This package is easy to use and leaves camera information in the .jpg file intact in editing sessions. When using the "Save As..." function select the button "Options" and then use the JPEG quality lever to fit within the 256K (but smaller is acceptable). Set the image quality or file size lever to something like 6, 7 or 8. A good compromise between quality and size.

Using XNView to make smaller images

On Xnview... what we recommend to do is this:

1. select the picture
2. Crop to just the area of interest (get rid of borders and background). Use:
   • Edit / Set Selection Ratio 3:2 (gets you nice rectangular selection)
   • Select the area
   • To flip between horizontal and vertical orientation use TAB
   • Move the selection window until you have just what is needed
   • Then do Edit / Crop (or CTRL-Y)
3. Now you have the area of interest. If you need to do any colour, sharpness or other fixes, do them now. Just experiment.
4. Now make sure the longest side is something like 640 or 800 pixels, depending on the amount of detail and size of the picture needed. Do that using Image / Resize. Make sure "Keep Ratio" is checked, and change the largest value (either X or Y) to the required number of pixels.
5. Note, if that means you are increasing the size... don't do it, you'll lose detail.
6. Press the "Save As" button or use File / Save As. Save as a .jpg file. See notes below on naming your file.

Naming your picturefile

To ensure that you have no poblems in uploading and later referring to your picture, save your picture as file type JPG. Do not use "spaces" in the filename, or any other characters than letters, numbers and underscores "_". They will give problems. On this Forum, each uploaded file needs to have a unique name. If you upload a file called "Pagoda.JPG" you are very unlikely to succeed. The best way of making your filename unique is to start off with your username as the first part of the file name, followed by a date and a serial number. E.g: "pete_20081104_001.JPG" is likely to be unique.

Uploading your picture

Edit your post. Then add an attachment at the end, prior to submitting your posts. All image attachments will be visible in-line in the forum. A maximum of 4 attachments can be stored per message.

Note that attachments are handled in a completely different way in this new forum. No more pop-ups appear, and no code gets inserted in your message. The attachment is uploaded when you post the message.