How to post an image and upload photos to TT

For help on how to post an image to the TT chat forum, read the help page:

• How to post an image to TT

Further helpful tips are also given in the discussion below.

Hey all, so I have pics from Kilians from Friday, but when I try to post it says they are too big... any suggestions on how I can get this done?

You can edit them yourself by right-clicking, 'open with' and hopefully you have Photoshop or Microsoft Photo Editor.

There are options for re-sizing under the 'Image' menu in both I believe.

When you take your pics next time (for Toytown) you can probably adjust the options on your camera to take smaller pictures. The resolution won't be as good...but if you are not printing them and people are only viewing them online, it should be fine.

A great free tool for image viewing/resizing is IrfanView.

If you are using PhotoShop/PhotoDeluxe you can also batch process on a folder so you don't have to resize each picture individually.

File -->Batch Processing, brings up dialog box where you can convert file type, size with contstraining, rename and put the resulting files in another folder entirely.

You're better off resizing in some way. 640x480 is usually perfect for webbie pictures. Makes it friendlier for people viewing them.

Photocleaner is a good tool which will automatically do some basic resizing, sharpening, etc on multiple files.

For somewhere to upload to there are a number of free sites or you can go with hosting of your own. Depends what you want really.

If you're selling stuff and your pictures are too big to be uploaded:

cut the extra bits of each photo off. Nobody cares what room your stuff's in.

Reduce the size of the photo to maybe 300x300 px.

Reduce the quality of the photo to 70%. BTW your photo format should be JPG or JPEG.

Do NOT put your "for sale" pics in the Gallery. They will be deleted. The gallery is for entertainment Germany-related photos only.

That should take care of any problems.

More help posting images...

Generally, yes, then you use the "choose" thing to add an attachment, browse for it, and add it to your post.


Yes, for that you right-click on the image, "copy image address", then click on the "IMG" button above your posting window and paste the image address in there. The board takes care of the rest. That's called "hotlinking" an image, and if the person removes it from their website, the image itself will disappear from your post. Don't worry about that though. This also doesn't work with all images, there are ways to protect them so they don't get used like that, but give it a shot.

Oh yeah, no posting copyrighted stuff. You know what I'm talking about.

Or they will replace it with a picture of a dwarf having sex with a fat woman. Cause hotlinking is an internet crime!

I don't believe it is a crime to hotlink an image. If it were, then surely the people whose images are hotlinked would not simply replace their image, but would call the police and get hotlinkers into trouble. Your source please?

Just google bandwidth theft.

Suggesting hotlinking is not a clever idea. A good idea would be to tell people to use imageschack or something similar. You pay for bandwidth, when people use it without you permission then thats theft.

If people steal my bandwidth, I mod_rewrite their asses.

Yeah you can even set things so that if they try and link to an image - you can replace with one "of your choice".

Use Outlook to reduce photo sizes for posting pictures in forums.

Best thing to do first is create a new folder called something like "Toytown Pictures"

Right click on a photo in your Camera folder and choose

"Send to" "mail recipient"

Outlook asks in a pop up window whether or not you want to "make my pictures smaller"

Choose yes.

An email will appear with the picture as an attachment.

Click on the attachment (in the mail) and choose "save as"

A new window appears asking where you want to save the picture

Choose "Toytown Pictures"

The picture will be reduced by approximately three quarters in size.

Regards,

TG.

my photoshop is in german, its microsoft office picture manager, does anyone know how to resize a photo in this in german?

just do it in Microsoft Paint - which you can find under Start/Alle programme/Zubehör (then use Bild/Strecken in Paint)

Or in Photoshop Bild/Skalieren/Bildgröße

Recently I have seen lots of posts (mostly adverts) where people say "sorry, i can't seem to attach photos". Is it that they don't know there is a size limit? Is it because they don't know how to change the size? Is it because they can't be bothered?

Anyway, shouldn't the forum software be able to automagically resize big images? Would make it simpler for everyone I think...

Topics merged by admin

b/c we're stupid.

i'm aware i need to change the picture, but i never seem to do it correctly and TT won't take the photo so that's my reason.

Most people don't know how to resize images it seems.

Here's another one.

you posted a very fine picture just yesterday evening

Thank you, but as it happens the staff stuff was just the right size for stuffing into a TT post.

luckily i can resize pics on my digital camera, so when i post pics i took, i have to sort them out and resize the ones i want to use. for most other things, i end up using a screen capturing tool and then saving that to a .gif or .jpg.
there are lots of free resize programs. i suppose for noncommercial use, they are just fine.

Windows itself has a simple and straightforward one - MS Paint

i'm trying resize a picture using paint, but entering in the pixels (100x130) i want, but it doesn't resize the whole picture, it basically crops it. can someone help?

Do not enter pixels as you may distort the picture. Instead scale it to a smaller size(80%, 70%,...)

I highly recommend a free programme called IRFANVIEW

Just google to find it.

Re-sizing just couldn't be easier!

Yeah, you are I think using the "Attributes" open which is changing the size of the image, not resizing it. In other words you'll always just get the bit in the top left hand corner.

As far as I know you cannot resize using MS Paint. I use Irfanview here as well. Provides all the basic image editing features that you need.

I've just finished a short script for windows that you can drag a folder of pictures onto and it will:
1. Create a copy of every picture in the folder that is resized to TT size (640x480)
2. Create a private album on TT and upload every resized picture (in order)

It does require that you install perl.

If you would like to try it out, PM me and I'll PM you back with instructions for installation and use - plus the items needed to run it (or where to download what you need).

yup, exactly. i'll use paint for run o tha mill cropping and such, but i guess for changing the size of the pic does not work.

just downloaded it.

oooh-ahhh
i just need to upload a certain sized pic to the company address book and it only work with specific pixel size, but thanks.

Hello, for the life of me, I can't upload images for my classified ads on TT. Could someone give me any pointers on things I might not be doing correctly.

Thanks.

Topics merged by admin

Most likely your images are either too large or in an invalid format for use on the site. How big are they and what is the extension?

You should find all the help you need at the following links:
How to Post an image on TT
Reducing Image Size
Resizing photos

I'm having problems including images in a post. I click "Browse...", select the file I want from my hard disk, so the filename appears in the box, then I click the green UPLOAD button. The message "Uploading File..." appears, together with a whirly thing going round and round to show it's doing something ... but nothing further happens. It just sits there like that for ever (well, OK, 15 minutes or so) until I give up waiting, and close the window.

This happened both with .gif and .jpg files, and they were within the 80k limit. I think this is the first time I've tried to upload an image since the forum software upgrade. Am I doing something wrong?

GT, maybe you are over the global upload limit for your account? However, then you should see an error message or something.

I had this problem the other day when I uploaded my photos of the English Garden covered in snow. When I tried it later again, the one photo at least worked. Maybe the server was overloaded at the time? No sé.

Btw, Greentea you really should tell me about your toenail. I find it very inspiring.

@Dostoyevsky: Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think I'm over the global upload limit (didn't even know there was one), as I don't post pictures very often.

@MajorBummer: Thanks, at least I'm not the only one with this problem then. I tried again a couple of hours later, and it still didn't work.

Remind me to tell you about my toenail next time we meet. I think both myself, and the rest of TT, will be happier if I don't go into the details on a public forum.

I notice that, since the software "upgrade", the upload limit for photos has been reduced from 120 to 80 kB. Am I the only person to find this a little restrictive? I mean, I have Photoshop on my computer and maintain three websites so I know how to minimise image sizes, but I still find this rather on the low side, especially if you want to post more than one picture.

Rule of Thumb: for pictures with less gradient in them, with flatter areas where you can aesthetically accept a slight degradation, you can export as Gifs or Pngs in Photoshop. More colour variation demands Jpeg. Fireworks can reduce immaculately but unfortunatley isn't readily available to all. In any case, when exporting from Photoshop, you can always compare with the 2up tab and monitor your filesize. But 80k is admittedly, a bit 1998.

@GreenTea: What browser are you using?

I experienced the same problem as you a few days ago and gave up after the upload button failed to upload the pic. After reading your post I just had another go, and it still didn't work with Mozilla Firefox v. 1.0.7, but did with Internet Explorer v. 6 and Firefox v 2.0.0.1, so maybe this would work for you too?

I'm not a teccie though, so it might not have anything to do with the browser versions.

I'm using Firefox v. 1.0.7 on Linux. I'm also not much of a techie though.

Agree. If you do bother to share a photo with other people, you wouldn't want the quality of the pics to be substandard. What's the point of sharing them then? If you compress the pics too much and size them too small, the effect gets lost.

Punchbear, become a Supporter and it'll help Editor Bob to save up the money for more disk space.

Aye, it's about feckin' time I did.

I can load photos either with Firefox (on a Mac).

Actually, I might know someone who'd be willing to sell (if he still wants to, that is) a Lacie 2TB Ethernet Disk at a good price, if that'd do anything to help increase disk space. Then again, with the volume of users here, 2TB probably won't go very far.

I'm not familiar with many graphics editors other than Photoshop and Fireworks, but if you're using Photoshop, here's some tips on getting your pictures ready for posting. I'll supplement with German.

1 - Presuming you haven't set your camera to take photos at 72 dpi (this is all a monitor will display, 72 dots per inch) or you have a "take photo for web" option not enabled yet, you should presume that your dpi is too high. This will invariably be the case if your image is RAW, Tiff or Pict format. If you can't tell, right-click on the image and get its properties. You will also need to make sure that your pic is RGB and not CMYK.

2 - After opening your image in Photoshop, you should check its' pixel dimensions and its colour mode.

Image size - You can do this by clicking on Image/Bild>Image Size/Bildgröße
A dialogue will open with Pixel size and image Size. If the linked Pixel "width/Breite" and "height/Größe" fields are in percentage, change to pixels. This is the size of your image in Pixels. You will also see a field containing your resolution/Auflösung. We'll presume that the Pixel dimensions are 3000 wide x 3000 high and that the picture resolution is 300 dpi. If it says Pixels/cms, change to Pixels/inchs. The higher your dpi, the more dots depicting the image per square inch and the better the picture quality. Now we have to get the picture down to an acceptable resolution for the internet and maintain quality.
Now click on Image>Mode. If any other mode than RGB and 8-Bit is ticked, change to RGB. If your picture was CMYK, you'll notice that it's not as yellow-biased anymore.

3 - Before you change the resolution, there are a few tricks you can try before beginning the reduction process.

a- Press Ctrl & zero, or Command & "0" on the Mac, to see the picture in its entirety onscreen. It may look slightly jaggy but don't worry.
b- If your picture looks slightly washed out, you may want to bump up the contrast slightly - Image>Adjust>Brightness & Contrast is the quickest way to do it. Use sparingly. If you really muck up, you can undo or go back using the history palette - Window>History.
c- Before you scale down, it's best to sharpen the picture up a little. You do this because when the intervening Pixels are recalculated in the rescale, parts of the picture are removed or joined in a best-guess by Photoshop. The picture will become slightly blurred and you'll notice less detail. Click on Filter>Sharpen/Scharfzeichnungsfilter>Sharpen/Scharfzeichnungsfilter. If you feel adventurous, use the Unsharp Mask tool, but for speed, the simple sharpen filter will do.

4) - Now go back to Image>Image Size. Like before we'll presume that the picture is big: 3000x3000 Pixels. We want to keep the proportions of the picture but have a lower dpi for online. If we enter 72 dpi into the resolution field, the 3000x3000 will change to 720x720. It'll be postable but hard to get under the 80k watershed and will occupy a large portion of screen real estate and possibly irritate other posters who have to scroll past it. So we want to change to 300x300 and maintain 72 dpi. Keep the proportions checkbox crossed and enter 300 in the width field. The height will also change to 300. This will be different, depending upon your pictures dimensions. Click Ok and the image will be resized. If it's still a little unsharp, run the filter. Picture is now almost ready for upload.

5) - If you're happy with the image, click on File/Datei>Save for Web/für Web speichern. The Save for Web screen opens. Click on 2-Up, so you have a preview of your optimization. Left is your original, right is basically how it'll look online. Right is the one you want to watch. It shows how big it'll be spat out, how long it'll take to download on various bandwidths, what type of file it is and except for Jpeg, the amount of colours.
a) The topleft pulldown in the dock at the far right of the screen is the key to the final step.
If Gif is selected in the first dropdown menu, it'll contains your filetypes (gif, Jpeg, Png), the one below it your palette types (adaptive, selective, etc) and below it again your dither settings. To the right of the palette pulldown is the amount of colours being used in your current picture. Below all this, if you've gif or png selected, is your palette showing all the colours being used in your pictures. Transparency and interlaced should not be checked. You don't need to touch anything else there.

If Jpeg is selected, the choices are more basic. You have a maximum to very low quality quick setting, and a manual quality field. Nothing else should be checked here.

b- Play around with formats. Jpeg suits pictures with many colours, tonal variations and gradients, landscapes and detailed imagery. Gif is better for images that have areas where colours are flat or blocky and don't have shadows or much highlighting.

c- If Gif works best, make sure that your palette type is set to adaptive. This will give you the best colour accuracy across multiple platforms and monitors, so everyone gets to see the picture as close to how you see it now. Change your dither to "No Dither". Change your colours to 256, if they aren't already. If you get lost, switch the format to Jpeg at maximum quality and then back to Gif, your palette will now be repopulated with the 256 most common colours from your maximum quality Jpeg.

Click on the first colour in the palette, press and hold Shift, then click on the last colour. All the colours should now have white boxes around them. Click on the padlock icon and they are now all locked in the palette. Check in the preview window, in the right-hand optimized version. If the filesize is still over 80k, click on the wee arrow slightly above and to the right of "Lossy", then in the menu click "Optimize to Filesize". Keep current settings and enter 80k. Photoshop will recalculate the palette to reduce the image under 80k.

d- If this looks really, really crap, try Jpeg. Go through the same "Optimize to Filesize" procedure. When you're satisfied with the quality, click save and give it a name and it's ready to go.

You can also automate all this in Photoshop using Actions and Batch processing, but I'm knackered and have to get some kip, maybe some other day. Best of luck with Photoshop, it's a serious piece of software - any problems, just PM

I just read on one page, that we are not supposed to use the IMG tag. Why not? I understand that hotlinking is bad, but if I upload the picture to my own server (or Flickr, for example, where I pay for hosting my pictures) it's not like I'm stealing bandwidth from someone without paying. Or are there other reasons why the IMG tag is not wanted?

because you could change the picture after a period of time so that todays picture of a fluffy white kitten could in three weeks be anything, say porn for example?

Okay, yeah, I see your point.

OK - I've read the links and the posts but I am still confused - when I "Add Reply" I have no attachment option?! I guess that totally excludes me from adding images.