Everyone has probably heard the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” CT Fish Stores agrees. We want to see your corals, fish, tanks and products and so do our members. Posts with pictures attract attention and help members and users understand what you may be asking.
My general feeling is that many members don’t post for various reasons:
- No camera
- No time
- Don’t know how
We can’t help if you don’t have a camera, you’re on you own there. But we can help with the time and know-how. Posting pictures is not hard and really only takes a couple minutes, something even the busiest person like me can squeeze in here and there. Ready? All righty, let’s get to it!
Step One - Getting the Pictures from Your Camera to Your Computer
The first thing you need to do is take the picture and upload it to your computer. Because all cameras are unique we cannot go into detail as to how to do that. Most cameras plug right into your computer and include the software to make moving the images simple and easy. Better yet, if your computer has a card reader pop the card from your camera and put it into your computer. If anyone has any questions on how to copy images from your camera to your computer, check the manuals that came with it, contact customer support or even try a post in our Photography forum. For this article, we are going to assume that you moved the images from your camera into a folder named pics and it is located on your computer’s desktop.
Step Two - Editing Your Photos - Cropping, Fit on Screen and Loading Quickly
OK, now that your images are copied to your computer we’re ready to work with them. One complaint I have is that many images are just too large in both dimension and file size. I don’t like to have to scroll up and down and side to side just to see an image. I don’t like waiting for them to load even more. I have high-speed connections on my computers and many large images still take much too long to load. We’ll address both of those problems and cropping.
Before we can start editing the photos we need a program to do that. I’m a big fan of PhotoShop Elements, its inexpensive and quite powerful. However, we like FREE because who wants to spend money they don’t have to? We’ll save that for frags. So let’s download a free program that will allow us to do everything we need it to do. Download IrfanView and the Plugins/Add Ons from the following link: http://www.irfanview.com/
Once you download both files, run the installer for IrfanView first. Then once that is completed, run the installer for the plugins. Now that IrfanView is installed, let’s open it up and start working our the images.
Here is what you will see when you open the program: (You can enlarge any image by clicking on it. To return to the article, click the Back button on your browser.)
Next go to File, then Open. Remember from the earlier steps we saved our images on the desktop in a folder names pics. Go to the folder and open the image. Now you’ll have your image up on your screen.
Now we will want to crop the image. Cropping is done to remove the parts we don’t like or to bring attention to the parts we do. Using the left button on your mouse, start in one corner of the area you want to crop. Holding the button, drag your mouse to the opposite corner. You will then have a box around the area you are cropping.
Next go to Edit and Crop Selection from the top menu. You will now have an image with just the part you wanted.
Next we need to resize the image to an appropriate size. I like to keep my images to a width of 600 pixels. To resize the image go to Image then Resize/Resample from the top menu. Be sure that the Preserve aspect ratio box is checked. The other options are beyond the basics of this article. Enter “600? in the Width box under Set New Size. You will notice that the Height box automatically updates. Click OK.
Great, we’re almost done already. Now we just need to save the file so it can be uploaded to the web. To do that, simply go to File then Save for Web.
This box will open:
Inside this box you will notice a slider next to Quality. Here is where you can adjust the quality of the image. The higher the quality, the larger the file size. I find around 60% is best. Once adjusted, click Save as. In the box that opens, select a location and give the image a name. Click Save. For our article we’ll call our image “fish” and save it back in the “pics” folder on our desktop. Click Close to close the box.
Step Three- Uploading Your Images
There are many ways to upload your images to the boards. One of the most popular and FREE services is Photobucket. Photobucket is an image hosting website that is quite simple to use. First, go to http://photobucket.com. If you have a Photobucket account, log in now. If you do not, click Join Now and register.
Once logged in you will see a screen that looks like this:
To upload an image, click the Choose files button.
If you are going to select multiple images, hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard and click the images you want to upload. Once they are all selected, click Open.
You’ll notice on screen that your images are being uploaded. If completed successfully you’ll see the following message:
Still with me? GREAT! Scroll down on the screen until you see the image you would like to post on the boards. When you put your cursor over the image some options will appear. One of the options is IMG Code.
Click inside the IMG Code box. You’ll notice that it highlights the images and copies it all at the same time.
Now lets go to CTFishStores.com You knew we had to get back there eventually. :-) Open a Topic box. If it’s a new Topic, give it a spiffy Subject and type any information about your picture in the text box. Then paste the code you copied earlier from Photobucket into this text box. The easiest way to paste the code is to RIGHT click the screen where you want to paste it and click Paste. When pasted your post should look something like this:
Lastly click Post and you’re done! Here is what the final product will look like:
I know it may look and seem like a lot of work but I can take a picture and have an image posted on the board in less than 2 minutes. Good luck and feel free to play around with it!
