Posting Photos for the Forum

[RWS]

Hello all,

I am doing a facelift on my boat and wanted to share the information as well as solicit ideas from the FORUM, but since the demise of our association with photobucket, I have no idea of how to do share the pix.

Any ideas folks???

P.S. Although I do occasionally show up on Fakebook as an alter ego, I prefer NOT to be there.

RWS

[GrumpyDuck]

imgur.com works well enough for sharing photos to the forum, easy to upload and get shareable links. Google Photos allows this too if you want more features.

[mikeandanne]

I have always done it this way cause I can't figure any of the others out. Just email the pics to yourself , that way they can be resized to fit the forum, then just save them to desktop or what ever , then you can upload from there to the forum.

[captainmaniac]

Pictures can be uploaded directly to the forum, but (as bad as this may sound it's actually good...), you should try to find an external hosting provider like Google, or OneDrive, or others, who you can just link to. Beacon pays a certain amount to host this forum / site. The more pictures that are posted directly to (or hosted directly on) the site increase the disk space they need to pay for, which increase their costs, which impacts their ability to continue to provide us with this forum.

While a single post may have 1K (maybe 1024 characters) worth of text in it, photos take WAY more space to store (not sure if limited to 256K but that's still 250+ times bigger than most posts). Multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of pictures posted annually, and we are talking a crapload of storage added yearly...

Try to post your images elsewhere and link to them in the forum if you can. Only upload directly to the forum's servers if you have to.

[WayWeGo]

I guess I have a different opinion about posting photos to the forum website. It has been quite frustrating to look for info on Trojanboats.net only to find all the photo links broken. One of the most valuable things this site provides to me is being able to look up how others have solved the problems I am currently having. Without the photos, this benefit is greatly diminished. If not for this site, I would never have bought our F-36, so this is a big deal to me!

If you are worried about the cost to Beacon, and I am glad you are, how about supporting the site with a donation? It is not cheap hosting the site and there are other costs besides the storage that are probably quite significant.

Maybe Bob will weigh in on his preference for hosting the photos.

[prowlersfish]

I down load the photos right off my computer as a attachment .

[captainmaniac]

If you are worried about the cost to Beacon, and I am glad you are, how about supporting the site with a donation? It is not cheap hosting the site and there are other costs besides the storage that are probably quite significant.

I always do support the site ... just haven't gotten around to re-upping for 2018 yet.

[WayWeGo]

Captainmaniac, sorry if I made that sound personal!

It was meant for everyone as a way of funding the extra cost so that the site would continue to be valuable long after the posts are made. By controlling the content, it is much easier to avoid broken links.

[RWS]

If you are worried about the cost to Beacon, and I am glad you are, how about supporting the site with a donation? It is not cheap hosting the site and there are other costs besides the storage that are probably quite significant.

Perhaps you are unaware that I created and continue to maintain and completely self fund the Trojan International Website, including all the security software that goes with it:

www.trojanboat.com

That website which is FREE and does not solicit any donations, sends significant traffic and business to this forum - with direct links at the bottom of each page, adding to the revenue stream of Beacon Marine, the supporter of this Forum.

So, as a matter of fact, I basically do support this website and forum both financially and with my generous donation of time.

RWS

[WayWeGo]

Today, I was looking for some info on Hynautic steering rebuilds and came across a post that would have been quite helpful, except, all the photos were missing: http://www.trojanboats.net/wforum/viewt ... tic#p98980. This is a great example of why it makes sense to post the photos to the board rather than a 3rd party website.

I am a member of another forum where I have posted many 100's of photos that I hosted on my own website. I no longer want to own the URL that they are posted under, but I am now paying every year so others have access to the info. That site also has the ability to host pictures, but not as easily as this one does, so I never took advantage of it.

[BeaconMarineDon]

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and comments on the image posting issue. Bob and I both feel it's best for the long term health and integrity of the forum to attach all images to the post and upload them to our server. This keeps all the contents of a thread (or topic) together and available to future users. It also prevents the broken link issue that happens with images hosted on other sites. It's true that we *do* need to keep an eye on disk storage space but that's a small price to pay for continuity and peace of mind. Hopefully, this clarifies the image issue.

Images are limited to 256Kb in size.
Feel free to use either of the free sites below to optimize, crop or re-size your images to meet the 256Kb limit.

http://www.resize2mail.com

http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx

[RonW]

For what it's worth, I use Picassa (free download) to organise all my pictures on the computer. It does a fantastic job. When you export from Picassa, it automatically downsizes the image. You export to a file (that you create) and then upload to this site from that file. Extremely simple, even for me.

Just a warning, when you download install Picassa, it finds EVERY picture on your computer.

Ron