How to resize & post pics using Photobucket

[BarelyAWake]

The primary reason we limit the size is when you post a un-edited, full size pic, everyone that wants to view that thread is forced to download all the pics in it. Given some of us are still on dial-up, it's courteous to reduce posted pics to about 72-180 pixels/inch and no more than 8x10" (for a forum this is still huge).

The un-edited picture from your camera is about four megabytes in size, even if you have even an elcheapo one like mine. This may not sound like much, but if there were the maximum allowed five pics per post - every 28 posts would just about equal downloading an entire music CD (actually store bought albums usually have far less than that - but that's another topic). So you see how this would destroy some people's browsing experience - forcing them to turn off images and defeating the purpose of providing pictures in the first place.

The image I'll be using as an example directly off the memory card and not touched in any way is;

Width: 3648 pixels
Height: 2736 pixels
Resolution: 180 pixels/inch
3.67 MB (3,849,876 bytes)

Resized to a comfy "medium" that same pic is now;

Width: 320 pixels
Height: 180 pixels
Resolution: 180 pixels/inch
53.1 KB (54,375 bytes)

I didn't add in how many inches this equals because that depends on your screen resolution and size - but most websites display 72 pixels/inch, so anything above that will effect displayed size and is usually a waste of time as we really don't need to be able to see every last pore, blemish and zit.

There are a bunch of easy solutions to this that don't involve installing any software or even learning the basics of photo editing. One such solution is Photobucket, a feature rich image hosting service that also now includes video. You can of course skip the rest of this post and go right to Photobucket Tutorials for the basics if you wish.

First, register for a free Photobucket account. Once that's completed, there are a bunch of options for making albums, setting privacy levels, and other goodies - but we'll skip all that and jump right to the good stuff - uploading, resizing, and posting pics and thumbnails.

There's a nice, big, blue button with "Upload images & videos" on it...


Pretty self-explanatory, just click it and it will bring you to this screen;


Just dig around till you find where your pic is stored on your computer, in this case I'm uploading directly from my camera's memory card, placed in the card reader of my computer. You of course may have your pics stored in other places. As you can see in the above pic - there's a bunch of options, you can get pics from other websites, phones - just about anywhere.

You can also upload mutable images and videos simultaneously by single-clicking one and going to the last one in the list, pressing the shift key, holding it down and single-clicking that last image. You can deselect single images or scattered ones that you do want by using the ctrl key instead of shift.

Now that you've got your pic(s) selected, just click the "open" button at the bottom right of the screen and it will bring you to this;


Depending on the number and size if the images your uploading and your available bandwidth, this could take a while - videos in particular you might want to be prepaired to wait a good long time. I tend to use Adobe Photoshop to resize my pictures beforehand to reduce this wait time - but if that was an available option for you - you'd probably not be reading this.

Once it's finished uploading it will bring you to this screen;


You can choose to fill in the blanks to the right, I never bother as everything I need to say will be in the post I'm puting the image in. Still - if you use the "public album" feature it would be nice to explain what people are looking at. Once your done, just click "return to album" and it'll bring you to this;

[BarelyAWake]

To resize the pic to a more manageable, reasonable size - you can click the blue "edit" right above the pic and it will bring you to this page with tons of tweaks and options like cropping, effects, and more;


Most of the time I don't want to bother with all of that and just want to resize easily and quickly. If you click the pic itself just once, it will bring you to a page with just that pic instead of your whole album but still display the list of code options and "zoom/edit/rotate/share/download/etc" above the pic. Click it again and it will disply only the pic full sized - so don't do that, we need those buttons.

If you click resize now - instead of bringing you to the editing page, it will display a list of dropdown options and sizes like this;


Both "large" and "medium" are pretty good for forum use - but a warning, should you choose to resize this way instead of the the more involved edit page it will only replace the original pic and not give you the option of saving it as a copy so be sure it's something you want to permanently alter. It will give you one last warning however;


Just click "OK" and it will bring you to the nicely resized picture and the list of "sharing" options.

They were nice and provided quite a number of coding options for both BBCode (forums) and HTML code (websites). Not all of the available codes are shown by default, the "thumbnail" one in particular is handy as that way you can have a huge, high resolution pic uploaded on Photobucket but not on the forum - when they click the thumbnail image, it will bring them to the full sized one in your album, very similar to the "attach" feature we have here. In order to enable the code display for the thumbnail feature and others, click the little blue "link options" at the bottom of the list and it will bring you to this;


Just check them all - but odds are if you don't understand it you wont be needing it anytime soon, but they're handy to have just in case. The three we're most concerned with are "Direct Link" which won't display a picture but will bring people to the pic in your album, "IMG Code" which will display a full sized version of your pic in the post itself (provided it doesn't exceed limitations), and "IMG Thumb" which will display a small, thumbnail version of your pic and will bring them to the full sized version in your album as I mentioned before.

Here's what the code looks like before the forum gets ahold of it;

[BarelyAWake]

and this is what they look like after they've been posted;

Direct Link;
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...m/IMG_1427.jpg

IMG Code;


IMG Thumb;


Just copy and paste whichever one you want into the text of your post, but remember - should you want to use just the IMG Code option without a redirect - you would want to resize that pic down to more resonable, courteous display and file sizes. You can also use the attachment feature provided by this forum to upload pics from your Photobucket account, just paste the direct link in the "Manage Attachments" window as described here: http://motorbicycling.com/f15/how-post-pictures-61.html

A handy little tip: Suppose you want to display a pic already on the forum or from another website but don't wish to go through the redundancy of uploading it to your own album first. Just right click whatever picture it is and choose "view image" from the pop up menu. Your browser will now bring you directly to just the image itself (sometimes you'll need to do it again), copy the full HTTP address from your browser's navigation bar, paste it in your post, and simply add the IMG code in brackets around it. If the address itself doesn't end with a picture file type (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc) it may or may not work, depends on that site's coding. Of course if you do this you have no control over the image - it may or may not be deleted at any time and some sites prevent/forbid you from doing this anyway. It is however very handy for showing someone a tool or a part for example without sending them to a site you may not approve of.


If you have ANY questions at all regarding pictures in the forum, please feel free to post them here. We dearly love having pictures of all the madness involved with motorbicycling - don't let something silly like a little bit of scary technology prevent you from sharing the fun of these machines.

[Tcams]

I know a really easy way where you dont have to even use photobucket.

I use Paint! Im pretty sure every computer has it and it is so much faster than up loading photo after photo.


Once you have uploaded pictures to your computer. Save them where ever you normaly save all pictures.

Then, Open up Paint and the picture will be very large depending on camera.
Click "Image" and click "Stretch/Skew"

On the first two boxes that say say 100% make the first top boxes say 50% depending on how big your pictures are. 50% works perfect for me.

Then, File, save as and it will save that size to the original picture.

Then just using the attachment way to upload pictures there is no need to upload using photobucket.

Just thought Id pass this along.

[BarelyAWake]

TBH, I primarily use CS3 as I despise Paint for what it can't do lol - but yeah it's easy, quick and free

I wanted to post the 'bucket option because I use the heck outa it for a buncha reasons - not least of which is the album feature, accessible from any computer no matter where I am w/o a care about what software it's got or OS.

We gotta get mo' movies up in here too lol

[Riding Rich]

Well what about the PDF files.
It becomes difficult for me at times.
I find the best way to share the CAD drawings is by printing them to PDF.
But a detailed drawing can be over the limit easily.

I use the tightest settings i can.

[BarelyAWake]

I'm not a huge PDF user 'cept mine ebooks o'course - but I do know you can import them into Adobe Photoshop and re-render as a standard image format. For straight PDF I'd just compress it usin' WinRAR (or not) and upload it to a free file hosting site like Megaupload.

[Riding Rich]

I suppose.

[BarelyAWake]

Well, I've noticed yer havin' success attaching them here on the forum... so I guess I dunno what yer question meant?

Sorry - threw that last post up in a hurry, I'm bein' sneaky at work again lol


edit: I jus' checked out some of yer PDFs (nice work BTW) and so far all the ones I've seen are tiny as far as file size goes...

[Riding Rich]

I get them there yes.
But it could be in color.
And any more than what you have seen me post won't take.

Thanks i been working extra hard on that Porting thread.