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Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Sat Feb 23, 2008 9:44 pm

Including an image in your post and capturing screen images
23-Feb-08 M.Fields (with help from Mona)


I realize there is a lot of “information” here – not all applies to all situations – just use the portions that apply to what you are trying to do

There are 3 parts to including an "image" for others to see in your post since the forum does not provide storage for images.
The following steps need to be addressed:

1) Capture the image (if needed) from the screen etc.
2) Place the image in a publicly accessible location so it is accessible to a browser (IE etc).
3) Create a post with an image "in" it by including a link to the actual image in your post surrounded with the appropriate "image" tags.

More detail on the above steps follows:

1) Capture the Image:
If the image you want to include is a screen capture of something (showing people how to set something up etc) then you need to do a screen capture of the area you want to display. There are a number of free ways to capture a screen image - some are listed below. If the image you want to include is one you already have, use the editor of your choice to add comments, arrows or whatever you want. Resize the picture so that it is an appropriate size for including in a post - typically between 200 and 400 pixels wide works well.

My Favorite screen capture:
My favorite is with a very worthwhile utility called Snagit ( $39.95 direct from TechSmith http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp - 30 day free trial). Snagit is typically activated when you press "Print Screen" - it freezes the screen and allows you to select the area you want. It then pops up a simple editor where you can add arrows, circles, notes etc to the image then save it in any number of formats. Snagit has a whole collection of neat features including "call-outs", special arrows and circles, text overlays, etc that really give your capture that extra special look and it is simple to use.
There are a number of other screen capture utilities out there - some for free, however, I have not experimented with any of them -- Snagit does everything I want and gets lots of great comments from others that use it.

Alternate FREE screen capture:
To use the free feature in windows, you have two choices - "Print Screen" will capture the entire screen while ALT+"Print Screen" will capture the active window to the clipboard. You can then open Paint and use the "Paste" function to insert a copy of the image you just captured. Use "Save As" to save the image to a jpg file.
Here are some good links with info on the "Print Screen" function (some include info on Vista)
http://windows.about.com/od/keyboardsho ... n_shot.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301583 <-- handy list of keyboard shortcuts from Microsoft

Another screen capture utility [thanks Mona]:

Fastone Screen Capture by FastStone Soft (now shareware)
Website: http://www.faststone.org/

To get the last free version (ver. 5.3 of Feb 12, 2007)
Download from here: http://www.aplusfreeware.com/categories ... pture.html
License: Free for home users
Download file size: 1380KB


2) Make the image available to the web:

Security issue: It should be noted that by looking at the “properties” of a picture on a web page, it is usually easy to get to the root directory for that user on the server and often see all other pictures, web pages etc that are on the server. If this is a concern, then you should use a separate server just for pictures that you are going to make public.

Once you have an image of the appropriate size with whatever notations etc you want on it, you then need to place it on a publicly visible server so that you can include a link to it in your post. What I often do is just put it on one of my web pages then grab a link to it (more on that shortly) that I can include in my post. There are a number of sites out there that let you share photos etc and some searching with Google will help find them. Some are free while others require payment of some sort. The chief requirement for this use is that the images MUST have a "static" location. This means if I look at it today, it has to have the same "location" shown in the "properties" as it does next week (there are a
number of sites that I have seen that build a "dynamic" web page when you visit it - this makes it easy for you to arrange pictures etc on it and as you add stuff up on their site, it moves it around so it works. The down side of this is that the location of the image as seen in the "properties" changes each time you visit the web page - this makes it impossible to use a link to it for your post. The simplest way to check and make sure your image is publicly available (and this makes a handy way to keep pointers to these for later ... ) is to go to where the image is located on the server (usually a web page
of some sort). Right click the image and part way down the context menu, you will see "Add to Favorites". Add that to your "Favorites" (I have a folder called "Proshow Image Links" that I put them in - keep the address but change the name to something more meaningful like "My example of xyz"). Now, bring up a new IE window and try going to that link from the "Favorites" - it should load a page with just that image on it.

NOTE: You can get the address of any image on any web page the same way - RIGHT click and select "Properties" then copy the url of the image. One of the other options from the RIGHT click menu is "Save Image As" which lets you grab a copy of an image off of a web site (be careful to observe copyrights and other people's rights if you are grabbing something of their web site). This method works for Firefox and IE.

You now have the url of the image you want to "include" in your post (it doesn't really include the image, it just resolves and loads the url you provide in your post).

Public Servers for your images:

Two servers that I am familiar with are Photobucket ( http://www.photobucket.com ) and Flickr ( http://www.flickr.com ) – these are only 2 of many sites available including simply pointing at an image on your web site (but review the “security” comment above). Both sites have free accounts you can sign up for. To get the image address from photobucket, it is actually fairly slick – you simply click on the “IMG Code” button (see the following image) and it will copy the url of the image complete with the appropriate image tags to the clipboard which you can then paste into your post.

Image

If using flickr, you copy the url from the “properties” of the image, but then when you paste it into your post, be sure and remove anything following the .jpg/png on the end of the filename – you only want the portion starting with http and ending with jpg or png.

For other servers, you will need to experiment and see what works.



3) Create a post with an image "in" it:

One important thing to understand here is all you are doing in your post is providing a link to the actual image you want to display - the post itself does not include the image nor does the Enthusiasts group provide any storage for images.

Create your post - where you want your picture to be, paste in the url of the picture where ever you have it publicly available. Now highlight the url you just put in and click on the "IMG" button - this will put the img tags on both ends of the url you just provided (if you used Photobucket and clicked the “IMG Code” box, your url that you paste in already has the appropriate IMG tags – you can skip clicking the “IMG” button above your post. You can click the preview button to see if it loads correctly then click the "Submit" button.

NOTE: Since the image that is visible in a post is NOT actually stored as part of the post, recognize that if that image is moved by the owner to a different location (change folder, abandon web page, whatever) the image will no longer be visible in the post. This is a good reason to print out posts with images in them if you want to be able to refer back to them later.

mikey -- comments welcome (yes, I know it's wordy ! :D )
Last edited by gpsmikey on Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:28 am, edited 2 times in total.

Sat Feb 23, 2008 10:20 pm

Hi Mikey,

Thanks for all that useful information...could you also post this in the PSG Tutorial section?

Brenda

Screen Capture & Resize pictures with IrfanView

Sat Feb 23, 2008 11:19 pm

Excellent Mikey !! :D

Another free alternative for screen capture and resizing of pictures is with the aid of IrfanView.
IrfanView http://www.irfanview.com/

IrfanView is probably the most versatile free program for viewing images on your computer, and probably the most used worldwide.
When you download the program, make sure you also download the plug-ins

Here are two excellent tutorials for capturing screens and resizing your pictures with the aid of IrfanView

Screen Capture
http://www.lvsonline.com/tut-screencap/index2.shtml

Resize images
http://www.lvsonline.com/tut-resize/index2.shtml

Sun Feb 24, 2008 7:31 am

Brenda wrote:Hi Mikey,

Thanks for all that useful information...could you also post this in the PSG Tutorial section?

Brenda


I just did - I had wanted to talk to Mike Gregg about what he thought of it and if
the tutorial section was the right place. He agreed, so it is now copied over to
the PSG section as well.

mikey

Sun Feb 24, 2008 8:17 am

Thanks Mikey...I'm sure all the PSG users will find this info just as valuable as the PSP users.

Brenda

Mon Mar 03, 2008 7:47 pm

Wonderful information Mikey. Thanks to you I bought Snagit and use it a lot. This was very nice of you to take the time to get this information together and post it for our use.

Thanks again,
Douglas

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Tue Feb 03, 2009 11:54 am

Security issue: It should be noted that by looking at the “properties” of a picture on a web page, it is usually easy to get to the root directory for that user on the server and often see all other pictures, web pages etc that are on the server. If this is a concern, then you should use a separate server just for pictures that you are going to make public.


Wasn't sure to start new tread or not! If you could give more specific info on above - I'm not clear what you meant, it would be appreciated.
Thanks Ron

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Wed Feb 04, 2009 8:06 am

Some people don't like to give out their web page address for example. If you right click on a picture in a post, you can see what the real address of that picture is. From that, you can make a pretty good guess as to the rest of the directory structure and if the person including the "picture" in their post did not want others to know where it really was, that could be a concern. For example, if you right click on the image of our little hummingbird (hat was extra) below and select properties, you will find that I have it stored on Photobucket in the path
http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj29 ... ta_6-1.jpg
The intent of my comment was to make sure people understood that this information was available. If for example, you have a web page you don't advertise that is for family only etc, but use a picture from there in a post by using the address of the picture the web page is on, I can tell the address of the web page itself and view it if I wanted to in most cases.

Image

mikey

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Wed Feb 04, 2009 8:51 am

Just to add to this a little, if you store your images or files in a subfolder on your own server and don't have an index.html file located in that folder it may be possible for someone to view the entire contents of that folder. For example, I keep the Member Created Files for this forum in a subfolder located at files. If I didn't have an index.html and you navigated to the URL shown you would get a list of every file stored in that folder. Instead, you get a web page that redirects you back to the forum without having access to all of the files. Some web hosts offer the ability to prevent visitors from viewing the contents of subfolders if you don't have the index.html file, but to be safe you should include the file.

Mike

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:44 pm

So Mike I should include my index.html in all my subfolders? Thanks Nanny

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:54 pm

Mikey,
Another useful tutorial from you. I often wondered how some folk had managed to paste images into their posts.

I use a free screen capture program called (unimaginatively) capture.exe. It can be found at
http://www.nestsoft.com

Regards
Jason

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Sun Mar 08, 2009 11:36 am

Hey Mikey
All your info has set in well but on an offtake ... I've noticed some members actually have their screenshot in their post and not a link to a server holding the file. How is this done?
Thanks Ron

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Sun Mar 08, 2009 1:44 pm

I'm not aware of a way to actually include the screenshots in the post - you can include text etc using the "code" tags, but I don't think you can actually have the image in your post (and Mike seems to confirm that with his comments above). Have you got a link to an example of one that is included in the post ??

mikey

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Sun Mar 08, 2009 2:27 pm

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11000
http://www.proshowenthusiasts.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11000

heres the latest one i've seen - not the first i might add
Ron

Re: Tut - Including images in your post & screen captures

Sun Mar 08, 2009 2:59 pm

rich

The only picture in that thread does link to a server http://psw******ting.com/Images4BBs/PSP-Modf-Help.jpg which you will see if you right click and go to properties.

***** are my insertion to deactivate the link.
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