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photobucket hosting

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Blain

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Anyone else get a message that the free account will no longer support 3rd party hosting?

The only program they offer for 3rd party hosting is $399.99 per year!

I think a lot of images are going to disappear from VAF.
 
I have a Plus20 plan with them for 10 years or so and I am not able to renew it as of now. An email from their technical support says they are unable to locate my account. Might go blank as well soon...
 
Have not received a message yet but almost every photo I have on the VAF Forums has been hosted there. NO I will not pay BLACKMAIL to Photobucket and will be looking elsewhere for image hosting.
 
I have not gotten a message from Photobucket about the changes but tried to download my 300 or so photos to my computer with no luck. Testing image linking here:
DSC01469.jpg
Looks like it is still working,,,,,, at least for now.
 
It was great while it lasted.

So, where do we go from here? All my photos are on PhotoBucket. Anyone have another site that's free and easy?
 
So far, all my pics hosted by PhotoBucket are working normally. I just uploaded some new pics there.
 
According to their blog we will all go blank after Dec 31, 2018. Unless we pay a $400 ransom. It was surely worth $30 a year with all the glitches.
 
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I use TinyPic.com and they have an app for iphone that works on the fly. Sadly it too will most likely be gobbled up by Microshaft and require you to pay for hosting. Free for now tho. Woody.


So, where do we go from here? All my photos are on PhotoBucket. Anyone have another site that's free and easy?
 
Just this second I got the email from Photobucket saying that they noticed I used the photos on other web pages (like VAF) and that's being disabled.

They claim the photos are still available though I still have them on my home computer.

So I am removing my photos from photobucket and closing my account there.
 
The Risk

This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.

What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?
 
This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.

What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?

Agree. Many other forums have their own photo hosting.
 
Would it be practicle to make the direct photo upload charge optional? If a subscriber doesn't want to upload photos, he/she doesn't pay the extra charge. I most certainly would pay extra for it myself, I've pretty much given up trying to post photos, it worked for a few but I can't seem to make sense of it anymore. Don't worry, I'm better at building airplanes than I am at trying to figure out computers!
 
This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.

What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?

Agree 100%. Would love it!!
Johan
 
all my photos are backed up on google and microsoft onedrive. I gave up on photobucket fairly recently as well and have since moved to imgur for posting onto forums.
 
This is the risk of requiring your users to host their photos elsewhere. When Photobucket and other sites began eliminating 3rd party hosting, all the existing links on VAF will be useless. I'm a paid Photobucket subscriber so you'll see my photos through then end of December 2018. Then, any photos I've posted will show up as one of those hated ? icons.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Doug, I love VAF and have all the respect in the world for how you've structured your business model. But, this is a sea change. So, again, I suggest you consider a new business model that includes a paid subscription that allows users to upload and post photos directly on VAF. Most of your users are aircraft owners, people of means, and I expect most of us could afford a few extra bucks a year and would appreciate the convenience of being able to upload our photos directly. The bigger benefit though is you / VAF will own and hold the photos! No more nasty ? icons in pasts post.

What say you Doug? Can you implement a paid subscription, beyond the normal donation, that includes photo hosting?

Another vote for it here - make it separate from the site access so it's optional and not required, but I've been a regular donor here for many years and would happily pay more for that option.
 
Dead links

There wont be getting around the dead links to any photobucket image. Even with a new image host who would go back through all their posts over the years just to re insert new links?

The usefulness of VAF after Dec 31 just took a serious blow.

I feel like a sucker having relied on the free level of Photobucket.
 
Or just pick a service perhaps that is stronger from the market perspective at least for now...

Why not just share from google photos (or onedrive, etc)? Sure, it is the same problem (3rd party) at least though you are choosing for the moment a third party that appears strong for a long time to come.

Edit: Google Photos you have to right click and get the image URL, it is far from a no brainer, but works. Anyways the point was pick a strong for the moment 3rd party and use that instead. And yes, I realize that the industry does change rapidly.. Google MSFT are probably safe bets.
 
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There wont be getting around the dead links to any photobucket image. Even with a new image host who would go back through all their posts over the years just to re insert new links?

The usefulness of VAF after Dec 31 just took a serious blow.

I feel like a sucker having relied on the free level of Photobucket.

The usefulness is certainly diminished to some degree with the loss of some of our photo history but the information and helpfulness contained in this site far overshadows that loss.

Using "free" commercial sites is always a risk but even the paid services go out of business - happens all the time in the internet small business environment.

I used PhotoBucket to host my photos but I haven't posted all that many. I picked a few that I really wanted and moved them to www.halie.com and edited the links. Wasn't hard.

The hardest part was finding the posts the contained photos. It would be real handy if there were a way to search for our posts that had photos. In the Advanced Search, if I could have done a "Search by User Name" for posts that contained the string "
 
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Well I just deleted every single one of my pictures from Photobucket and ended my account.

It became completely impossible to do anything on the web page with the endless and numerous pop-ups. Naturally they want money to eliminate the ads.

No way.

So I no longer have an account there.
 
Use google search

...

The hardest part was finding the posts the contained photos. It would be real handy if there were a way to search for our posts that had photos. In the Advanced Search, if I could have done a "Search by User Name" for posts that contained the string "" it would have made that easy.[/QUOTE]

I think a google search will do what you want instead of a VAF search.

In my case a Google search using "photobucket az_gila site://www.vansairforce.com/" seems to bring up links to my posts with pictures
 
Boy, you get one heckuva long link when you right-click and "Copy Image Address" in Google Photos:

35396716090_7ac9d5fdd3.jpg


But it does work:

-_n2LVyrw3pBNQUrrvTNlcHw3gQPcsGt7ot5aDHuOppCbhcugHIWPpdTg0qofBCgSW0J1zNo1KfdhhG66bFqwhESuDvvyXsCcmAbscfQ-_orFQYWzVyPdIoF4nU1eB6emfcaMjMYBIb4__HES4ZjB0YNSNFpaCW6hcrImTepzyhdJ40MRe3nJILUGBxrYOq7vmj6X5_Xyy8lXIfpC7bbP46VNf6qqJXhJU6mtk4N4NhJV7Da-vnLxtKpQf3fCGZmMy6al4QC-ioPFU4MlmJ80LpyleULaeAukIqzDTvlQzI0S4bv1_SmsLdC7FQiQrkWgASrDohCHd-kqqKi5BFTmFKd1VELgHitX7Cna-Bb-NfBC08nwn32LMmPMuLFFDDZajlLecPvgnmpmO5Pqg4D9K3_RDZSy52SILW8bhI47Fk9SAstfqJKvqq2QQybwm-Et0US0H0jG-lThL52QfCqLJQz91JVc6oEBPH8ZYopvYD2-mkVCPwIG4bpqKLRGtKspOI8EnvkWmKhC-9iAZLr0RM3alzIUu4t8DsxH4Z03dowBw7-Y10xMulF98x2FdryhXP9JcoBCXehXlZAoI-U3x-x8sUv6ClCHEQ0pYQWGTgVmsc-OA=w600-h816-no


That's on a Mac. Now I need to figure out how to do it on my iPad. And it's not immediately obvious how to post a smaller image.

Never mind - just change the number after the last little "w" to something like 600 (in this case from 1088) and the height adjusts automatically.
 
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I think a google search will do what you want instead of a VAF search.

In my case a Google search using "photobucket az_gila site://www.vansairforce.com/" seems to bring up links to my posts with pictures

Hey, great catch, I didn't think of that. I did have to include my PhotoBucket UserID, fortunately different from my VAF ID, in the search otherwise I got all posts that I had contributed to where anyone had posted a PhotoBucket picture but, other than that, worked great.
 
OK, I got this to work on my iPad. NOT using the app, but within Safari.

Open the photo, then click and hold and select "Copy".

Then paste that link and put "img" tags at either end. Make the width something like 600 and "viola!":

zKeip2gqixeeWzIglkiifwWh_P-nWyif0icRBOfbedQcN3fFv5eZ-41FrOqC1pBb8CfKYooJezpVIDBCRkfrBd-2suHgAgNKWoTVCznJTxN12ukgRJ3tmy_vYtEoeOfR_Lvid03CrQBJhYEK_O6mstGi5yxJ7vaGGWqGF85CUPLBr5yq4MGTvPPTpKCeFEaUq9KvnHCLS9GIlp0XXbB8AYSDP3ZQSbEI6ewvpw7KJKrD71ksu56MFU-7Dn5fneGr_zVxKgmAhpHwUX5MgSwRE1lar61SW6rllQDSXPTMBhWj9GB7FwiOtkEnZ-kmePrSQEQUsiO4Jpvrjhfn8axBBjldY098gHRTdeWPUrIGUhZcOKcude64hQPq4JvDOuLh-enQK3DHCk8KJYqB9FprCSCpCeARQ0juPs6od3tQzdF40UlGyUHW9Svov7jR49dUEQNEnIutQJC6OXlC62DtUk7LLnLupI8lfa7nlPfh6bL6LnZ1m8MNvI346phPzWGMN7tQSpSULqlxsYb-MST9jYuXIIf9vMe6pW81t5KShpmFV6Y-pYhmFzo3fau45e_sCbz52s8oVz-tMB1uK2Kxo3J7mR0wCO0oQk5v4Jcr7ZTpOe61Y6UUO2wZdg=w600-h1346-no


Again, I'm fortunate to not have ever used Photobucket, and I deeply sympathize. Now I can keep using Flickr or Google Photos. My photos automatically upload to each, but the search function on Google Photos is much better.
 
Naturally they want money to eliminate the ads.

Which is not unreasonable. Either the advertisers pay, or the users pay. For sure, somebody has to pay the bills. I have no objection to a paid account, with Photobucket, or with Doug. The issue is price vs value. I am not willing to pay $399 per year to illustrate forum posts for the benefit of others.

Useful statistics: I have a lot of images posted to VAF, about 10 years worth, as I post technical references as well as build and flight photos. Even so, my entire Photobucket storage is only 0.2 GB, for which I'm currently paying Photobucket about $30 per year.
 
Which is not unreasonable. Either the advertisers pay, or the users pay. For sure, somebody has to pay the bills. I have no objection to a paid account, with Photobucket, or with Doug. The issue is price vs value. I am not willing to pay $399 per year to illustrate forum posts for the benefit of others.

Useful statistics: I have a lot of images posted to VAF, about 10 years worth, as I post technical references as well as build and flight photos. Even so, my entire Photobucket storage is only 0.2 GB, for which I'm currently paying Photobucket about $30 per year.

I don't mind ads in general - as a concept. I understand they have to make a buck.

But the number and frequency of their ads was so egregious I could not actually do anything for long periods of time. The screen would freeze. This was making me want to look for another photo host service even before the email.

The email tipped it
 
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An alternative

You might want to consider setting up a web site/blog account with a service like ipage or Go daddy. This gives you your own little piece of real estate in the “cloud” which in reality is a server sitting somewhere as close to the artic circle as they can access without a bulldozer. You will have to register a domain name (joevanfanatic.com) with them and pay them an annual modest fee to keep your digital stuff there which can include any file under the sun. With most of them you will also get an email account with the name Joevafanatic.com meaning you will then have an email address of [email protected]. If you chose to use the email account.

Now, you can link your current email address, whatever it (they) may be, to your new nonexistent web site joevanfanatic.com so you do not have to tell all your contacts that you have a new email address.

All that is a bonus to the fact that you now have your own private photo dump in the cloud so you don’t need Photobucket or any other service. As long as you pay your annual domain registration fee and their hosting fee you got it. It is not free but it will be there as long as you pay them. Back it up monthly to your hard drive so if Go Daddy or whoever you chose goes t*ts up you can put the entire web site somewhere else using the same domain name (it yours because you bought it) so the links will not be broken for previously posted pictures. This is not as hard as it sounds and any IT shop worth much will be able to do it for you in a couple hours. If I was able to do it so believe me you all can.

The process to upload a picture or any other file type you may want is not much different than using one of the free services. Firefox includes an app (free) called Fire FTP that does the trick. There are many others like Filezilla which is a free FTP. Below is a screen shot of Fire FTP on my screen. On the left side is a directory/file listing for my hard drive, on the right is my cloud file structure. All this operates just like Windows Explorer. You select a file on the left for uploading, hit the right pointing arrow and up load it to your own personal cloud. Of course, you can do the reverse and download as well. If you are thinking this is a good way to back up important files you are right.

So now, your image string in the van forum will be http://joevanfanatic/vanforum/july2017/myprideinjoy.jpg myprideinjoy.jpg is the subject picture.

You keep a text file on your desktop with this string in it so all you must do is put in the name of the photo you are posting on the forum into the string and paste it into the forum text box. That way you don’t have to repeatedly retype the entire string and suffer the inevitable errors. I know this sounds complicated but you will get very good at it very quickly. With a little practice, it will take less time than the free services and you will have the additional benefits that come with it.

On the left side of the screen shot you will see a file tree from my hard drive with printscreen files selected and the .jpg file van1 selected. On the right side (the cloud site) you will see the file has been uploaded to the cloud location in the van/july17 folder or directory. After creating your text prose for the forum and inserting the appropriate string into the forum text box select preview and your photo should appear. If it does not your string has an error in it. It has to be exactly the same as the string representing the file structure on your cloud site. To make life easier on yourself do not use capital letters or put spaces anywhere.

Surely there are fellows on this forum much more knowledgeable on this topic than I and hopefully they will elaborate.

van1.jpg


van2.jpg
 
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Bruce Hill - you watching?

Bruce Hill has a nice website with his family and build pictures. Maybe he will tell us what he uses and the time/skills needed to set up and maintain. I like his format for viewing the pictures and they can be expanded for detail. Easy to back up to a higher level and look for what is desired.

Be careful with free because you will get something you must pay for. I found there are a lot of free and easy things in life that come with a price to undo. Get them hooked and up the prices - is a long standing and effective business model.
 
But it does work:

Not for me, are permissions all up to date? I see a negative sign.

OTOH I did have this issue with GoogePhotos once - it appeared I was properly logged in and viewing the photo from the proper place, but was not. I posted a photo in the usual manner and everyone else saw the big grey negative sign. Like yours. After logging out of GP then back in, the links worked. This is the one and only time with a GP issue. I also use Macs.
 
Oops!

I assumed if I saw I in the post, everyone would.

Can no one see the images I posted from Google Photos?

I'm fine continuing with Flickr, but it's nice to have options.
 
Oops!

I assumed if I saw I in the post, everyone would.

Can no one see the images I posted from Google Photos?

I'm fine continuing with Flickr, but it's nice to have options.

I can see the one in your pic in post 26 OK ...
 
Oops!

I assumed if I saw I in the post, everyone would.

Can no one see the images I posted from Google Photos?

I'm fine continuing with Flickr, but it's nice to have options.



I can see the one in your pic in post 26 OK ...

Ooops .. I checked with my smartphone and I was NOT able to see that picture. I checked some other photos that I knew were hosted on Google Photos and could see them OK.
 
But not in post 24?

Nope ...

I briefly looked at the source for that page and structure of that part looks about right. My guess is the Google Photo folder isn't shared correctly. I frankly don't know much that.

As a matter of curiosity I checked that page with all my browsers. Chrome could see post 26 but not 24. Firefox and MS Edge could see neither (no big minus sign - the lines with the picture did not appear at all). Way beyond me ...
 
The hardest part was finding the posts the contained photos. It would be real handy if there were a way to search for our posts that had photos. In the Advanced Search, if I could have done a "Search by User Name" for posts that contained the string "" it would have made that easy.[/QUOTE]
If it were possible, I suspect it would have happened by now. I've asked about this many times but received zero response.

I tried az_gila's trick of searching using Google (I tried "picasa Snowflake site:www.vansairforce.com"), but that returns a lot of discussions about what photo hosting site to use, what site not to use, complaints about hosting sites, etc. as well as posts where i've used Picasa to host images. It still seems to me that it would be easier to do a search just within VAF for posts that have picasa and [IMG] tags. Unfortunately Google doesn't see the [IMG] tags, those only show up when you edit the post. But they are stored in the post text on VAF, so a local search function should be able to find it.
 
Testing Google Photo

This image is from Google Photos. Right click on image, copy image address and use "insert image" icon on VAF. Works from this end. Let me know if the image comes through to you all.


F8FjyRXpQgvbblVkrNvkBu1NLYCibC2qXci2WAyf5LMoFXrss4WDyiEaYD_Y2Mq0czSzuVBM7fVg6CQYGTr3uxeipS7Snfa8bUxMuSs5WeOBBtKua-keW14GuWC5KmvF7JwnlTzcNJd3oRyudz6n5e3SpaAXe8FmGFylqj1M_Fgug3gGV65HC9xD42X9R1Zn0rK851BCKNsJJoKZ1wOOyDA1UmTwwNvhbzqlhhbUxAX66HVFxX6kUA8DQqUlYkewWwlJeTIqE8Uw1B6YPykdpsngfMybCiBRtx_DSfRArkFTwvdXB5TydyELQHpoBUvgjWgip6z8gX76wMHqOuaXypMIT8TUF4Cu3CNgamg50GITPF4AN3iX0lBQJ9iJnsh2xkZG581cNM6TbWlg4lPDsiuhJT9U5RsPTIZsVAVtlkmityuyf78llWKwkBg1LG6mp0BKt2ptEe4cDAEQpKLd6hUKTbNN8qhJySQI1gIFokD9LqLA83R_rAcc8krXOOXcX7hAHAYAkEGgYZtgac9wgGJQSBz_Xw-YoU4pnT0D0VxOOcbnuIvzcaH55pBFzZZU8hxowcGnrBxwk0t_uZ6EQr7laTuqVgoN64gkbnqauX2QoGcLRhDuowYwlWFZHGiKU6wFZkyinuFvISgppRzcfnJ0yFFrGCltB7pFVRjiaJmq3Q=w1395-h920-no
 
I tried az_gila's trick of searching using Google (I tried "picasa Snowflake site:www.vansairforce.com"), but that returns a lot of discussions about what photo hosting site to use, what site not to use, complaints about hosting sites, etc. as well as posts where i've used Picasa to host images. It still seems to me that it would be easier to do a search just within VAF for posts that have picasa and tags. Unfortunately Google doesn't see the [IMG] tags, those only show up when you edit the post. But they are stored in the post text on VAF, so a local search function should be able to find it.[/QUOTE]

I had that problem too but fortunately my PhotoBucket UserID was different from my VAF ID and I just did a search for my PhotoBucket UserID instead. Worked well for me but does depend on having a discrete PhotoBucket ID.
 
Many thanks to Vernon Smith for his tip on using your own site to host your photos! I followed Vernon's instructions, uploaded a test photo onto my GoDaddy host account using FileZilla, and then pasted the URL using the insert photo icon on the VAF 'Reply to Thread' and voila:

470panel.jpg


I also have a Photobucket free account and although I have heard nothing from them yet, I guess its days are numbered. I can see where it's going to be a bit of chore to convert all my Photobucket pictures to my GoDaddy host site if it comes to that. Wish I had thought of this a long time ago!

I would only add to Vernon's excellent post that another necessary step in the process is to resize your photos to a maximum width of 900 pixels before you upload them to your site. I think Photobucket must do that automatically.
 
I would only add to Vernon's excellent post that another necessary step in the process is to resize your photos to a maximum width of 900 pixels before you upload them to your site. I think Photobucket must do that automatically.

I didn't get into sizing because the post was getting long and sizing is impossible to do so that everyone gets the best picture they can. The problem is there is no way to know all the screen rations (16-9,5-4, etc.) or the resolution each user is using. This is further complicated by folks using the zoom setting in the "view" menu to make the small print more readable. I can tell Pat had been doing this a while because he has the magic number that works best for 90% of the screens folks will be looking at.

I edited my post to show you an example of that different sizing does. The top image is 800 pixels wide (the width is what matters), the second image I added below is 1100 pixels wide. As you can see the second image is more readable but will force a scroll bar to come across the bottom of the screen to accommodate the too large image. Our friend Chkaharyer99 with his great picture of vertical flight probably uploaded a picture over 1400 pixels wide which really blows up the page. As you can see it is necessary to use the horizontal scroll bar now to read a line of text. This is why the expensive forums have gone to picture hosting, they do auto sizing so this does not happen.
 
I didn't get into sizing because the post was getting long and sizing is impossible to do so that everyone gets the best picture they can. The problem is there is no way to know all the screen rations (16-9,5-4, etc.) or the resolution each user is using. This is further complicated by folks using the zoom setting in the "view" menu to make the small print more readable. I can tell Pat had been doing this a while because he has the magic number that works best for 90% of the screens folks will be looking at.

I edited my post to show you an example of that different sizing does. The top image is 800 pixels wide (the width is what matters), the second image I added below is 1100 pixels wide. As you can see the second image is more readable but will force a scroll bar to come across the bottom of the screen to accommodate the too large image. Our friend Chkaharyer99 with his great picture of vertical flight probably uploaded a picture over 1400 pixels wide which really blows up the page. As you can see it is necessary to use the horizontal scroll bar now to read a line of text. This is why the expensive forums have gone to picture hosting, they do auto sizing so this does not happen.

Well, I just learned something. That photo was uploaded by me, not Chkaharyer99. I resized it to 900 pixels wide. I'll remember to do this to all the photos I upload from now on. Thanks.

4KsF-H8azfNgCNh3kfXKNBS5-O13b8y61D_SVngsbvaGpJpGlxggRL95ZqSTLZvM8PXjf6JdWSPooYoYV-X7_fc6lilsb0IuL4NVG6lacRAtKmT3syJK8kDFUJfo9gtty19Xuy4DI81RXzvy0v26ZRHF38LDdwqV7546eRoyhMJm3CkY-4GTqQFo_17fuegg0XuY7h50MkOnsaTEi4GS8ppqce6YuxBEBuNpnguNChtrpPsvdoqs5gSWCqg2gJBMwm6QhmrmMVVVCDeN6sHSM6Qrm77lYAo7d2czegENxflxemnZG5nJ6CbiYgm3K5RpRkCl-_i4A9Z8oexEcCS9SpLUYABcC6J2ug9hN6uxuOpc8xQLCCfFPXJIEZSwxcFRvdWj-GigsOmhg04b2jV2cDbUp3RpjqCHrH7oZ8YQw2ol2kcTXDppfAx2VIOYRVe_5fgbnsvBWpqQbPX6_RIGMy7mpkzLPE0FSy-aw1vvvHgAPKhZa4HZJM8ZU_o_dKGv-QBvHPWHsbq1eSaDiOisq7UZdvle08sBCndYfcWEP2y7cLKPTrysQkZajD2b-IPUZOslRrO4dfyFjbAvFLsuw9chQYsA0oi89JHomdWRpL4NBRSFKbjEJ10XgbXjyAmXzcFfHX-iIN9CwbN5QTH4PPaqFWFIE0pQeyb07pBg_Tbryg=w900-h594-no
 
Sorry for the identification screw up, you can usually do a thousand pixel width without forcing the page into scroll country. This has always been a big problem for any forum that accepts random image links. It was really bad when someone with a huge Nikon with the image size cranked up to Hubble standards would pop a seven thousand pixel wide image into a forum :D
 
For anyone using Windows (there may be a similar app for Mac and Linux, but I haven't looked), there is an excellent tool for resizing pictures. It does a really good job of reducing the file size as well, I find the default settings for JPG quality are a great balance of small files and no loss of image quality. This started out as a Microsoft tool a few versions of Windows ago, but they abandoned it so someone else coded up an equivalent.

It's trivial to use, too... Just right click on any image (or set of images), choose "resize image" and then choose your output size. You can pick a custom size too, like 1000 pixels, if you want. Then you can upload to whatever your hosting site is, and the smaller file size will save you bandwidth costs.

http://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/
 
For anyone using Windows (there may be a similar app for Mac and Linux, but I haven't looked), there is an excellent tool for resizing pictures. It does a really good job of reducing the file size as well, I find the default settings for JPG quality are a great balance of small files and no loss of image quality. This started out as a Microsoft tool a few versions of Windows ago, but they abandoned it so someone else coded up an equivalent.

It's trivial to use, too... Just right click on any image (or set of images), choose "resize image" and then choose your output size. You can pick a custom size too, like 1000 pixels, if you want. Then you can upload to whatever your hosting site is, and the smaller file size will save you bandwidth costs.

http://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/


I run Linux and I use KolourPaint to resize the images. GIMP will work also
 
Rob’s program does an impressive job with one step editing. Be careful that the photo you are resizing has the same length to width relationship that Rob’s program is using. If not, you may get a picture of your RV-XX that comes out looking like a C-119. If you use a custom size be sure you retain the width to height relationship as well.

If you are using Windows I suggest you simply use Microsoft Paint. It’s in the MS accessories section with calculator, notepad, etc., works every time and will not crash. Looking at the image below, Paint will resize while maintaining the width to height relationship automatically. Just put 900 in the top box (under the maroon oval) replacing whatever is there and the bottom box automatically sets the correct relationship. The pixel numbers you will see when you open up the function will be the native (existing) photo size. In this case 640/ 480. If they are smaller than 900 insert the image as it is. Looking at the icon under the black oval shows the place to start resizing, the maroon oval on the right shows the pixels setting which is what you want to be using, not percentage.

Paint also has a crop function (above the black oval) that is real handy to cut out the part of an image you want without having to deal with everything. Click on "select" to the left of the black oval and select rectangular, "crop" will activate. Put your cursor at a position that represents the top left corner of the image portion you want-left click and hold-drag to the bottom right of the area you want and release. Now go up to "crop" and click on it, the area outside of your selection box should disappear. This takes a little practice. There are "do" and "Undo" icons in the top left corner, you will be using them a lot until you get it all figures out.

Depending on how much you want to wow your forum friends you can mark up your pictures with all kinds of custom graphics. At the top, you will see lots of shapes, select one of them-put your cursor anywhere in the picture-left click and hold- drag the cursor right and down-vuala! You can change the color of your circle or oval by clicking on any of the available colors. You are now a forum Rembrandt :D

picturesizing2.jpg
 
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I edited my post to show you an example of that different sizing does. The top image is 800 pixels wide (the width is what matters), the second image I added below is 1100 pixels wide. As you can see the second image is more readable but will force a scroll bar to come across the bottom of the screen to accommodate the too large image. Our friend Chkaharyer99 with his great picture of vertical flight probably uploaded a picture over 1400 pixels wide which really blows up the page. As you can see it is necessary to use the horizontal scroll bar now to read a line of text. This is why the expensive forums have gone to picture hosting, they do auto sizing so this does not happen.

Vernon, I suggested 900 pixels only because that appears to be what Doug recommends for his site. Here's a quote from his "Insert Pix" blog:

Making the image around 900 pixels wide or less preserves the proper word wrapping best on most monitors.

And that's pretty consistent with what you've been saying...:)

Thanks again for your excellent post and suggestion!
 
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