Welcome! One of the questions that appears frequently on the
Atlas forums involves inserting pictures into posts, or providing links to pictures in posts.
The purpose of this document is to (hopefully) provide enough information to get you started posting images and links to images in your posts.
If you've got comments about the guide, go ahead and send them to me
here.
There are times where I don't get to check personal email accounts very frequently, so if I don't reply immediately, don't take it personally!
I'm probably just swamped, and haven't had time to check the account or respond to your email.
After a question from forum member Steve Houston, I've decided to include the following disclaimer:
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Atlas Model Railroad Company, Inc., nor am I a moderator of any of the Atlas Model Railroad Forums at http://forum.atlasrr.com.
This website is not a part of the Atlas Model Railroad Forums.
The information contained within should be considered advice only, and by no means is intended to be construed as rules or policies of the Atlas Model Railroad Forums.
In order to post pictures to the Atlas Model Railroad Forums, you'll need a few of things:
- A membership to the forum. Registration is free. I'm assuming that if you're reading this page, you've already completed this step.
- Pictures you want to post. I'm guessing you're close to this if you're reading this page.
- Some place on the Internet to store the pictures. The Atlas Forums do not have the option to upload the pictures directly to the forum.
Item 1 on the list is pretty easy to come by, but the other two may take a little effort on your behalf.
Read on for information on
Getting Your Pictures Ready,
Putting your Pictures on the Web,
Adding the Image or Link to your Post,
and some Final Thoughts.
Getting Your Pictures Ready
So, let's talk about those pictures you want to post.
The pictures you're thinking about posting should be edited for convenient web viewing.
Just because your digital camera takes pictures at 2560×2048 or your scanner is capable of 2400 d.p.i. does not mean that that's what you'll want to post, for a couple of reasons.
First, the image files will be
huge!!! Try to keep in mind that most folks still access the Internet via a dial-up connection.
So, on a good day, their 56K modem might be able to download around 5KB per second, and that's
if they've got a good connection.
I've seen folks on dial-up who can't manage to connect above 24
kbps due to poor quality phone lines.
If you upload a 500
KB image, it's going to take those folks around 3½ minutes to download the picture!
It's called "surfing the Web" for a reason: it's like "channel surfing" on your television.
If it's taking so long for an image to download that people lose interest, they probably won't hang around.
Also, nobody's monitor is going to be able to display an image that size without having to scroll all over the place.
Having to scroll horizontally gets pretty annoying after a while, and if you insert a wide image into your post, it makes the entire page wider, so it becomes necessary to scroll horizontally just to read what others have written.
Have a look at an example of what wide images do to the forum here.
If you feel that you must use a large image to show detail, or a panoramic view, or whatever, then have mercy on the dial-up users and just post a link to your images.
That way, if you've described the picture as something they're willing to spend time downloading, they have the option to choose whether or not to view it, instead of being forced to wait for a lengthy download to complete.
If you've got a digital camera or a scanner, then you've probably got some image processing software, such as a "lite" version of Adobe Photoshop™, or Paintshop Pro, or ImageMagic.
Take a few minutes to find out how to manipulate your images to make them more "web friendly." Common edits are:
- Cropping: "cutting away" the edges of a picture so that only the object of interest remains.
- Resizing: changing the size of the image as it appears on the computer screen.
- Compressing: saving the picture in a space-saving format so that it will take less time to download.
Some cameras and scanners save images as TIFF, which is great if you're a graphic artist, but makes for huge files that not everyone will be able to view.
Better choices are JPEG (good for photographs and other pictures with a high number of colors) or GIF (good for line drawings, track plans, schematics, and images that have a limited number of colors.)
I'd recommend saving your work as a different file than the original.
That way, if you're unhappy with the results, you can start over until you get results you're pleased with.
Have a look at the edited version of the picture, paying attention to the file size.
Remember that most people on the Internet aren't going to be able to download much faster than about 5
KB per second.
You can use this to estimate about how long it's going to take for the picture to download.
Ten to fifteen seconds is probably acceptable (remember we're talking best-case scenario for download speed), but once you get over about twenty-five seconds, you're getting near the end of most web surfers' attention span.
Most programs that save files as JPEG have a "quality" setting; you can opt to include more detail in the image at the cost of larger file size, or you can reduce the file size by including less detail.
Try a couple of different settings to find the right balance between quality and file size for the image you want to post.
But, remember that just because that setting looked good for one image, doesn't mean that you've found a "magic number" that will work for all images.
Putting the Pictures on the Web
Now that we've got some appropriately sized images that have been compressed so they'll download in the blink of an eye, we need some place to put them, and a web server to send them to people when they view the image in, or click the link in, your post.
Since we want the pictures to be available at all hours of the day, we'll need to have them on a computer that's permanently connected to the Internet, which means that your home computer probably won't work.
Even if you have a persistent broadband connection (e.g. a cable connection, DSL, or fixed-point wireless), you'd need to install and maintain a web server to send the file to people when it was requested.
If you've got the technical expertise to set up a web server, then you're probably not reading this document. :^)
There are plenty of companies that will offer you free space on the web, like 20m.com, the company that hosts this site.
However, most of them are supported by advertising (via banner ads and/or pop-ups), so they won't allow you to show just an image, like you'd want to on the forum.
Just showing the image means they won't be able to show advertising, so they won't make money.
Usually, if you try to link directly to an image housed on one of these services, you'll get nothing at all, or an image saying that direct linking isn't allowed.
Probably the most overlooked place for web hosting is your own Internet Service Provider (the company you use to get connected to the Internet).
Most ISPs provide personal web space to their subscribers at no extra charge.
Since you're already paying for it, you might as well use it, right?
Check with your ISP to find out if web space is available, as they may have to set it up for you (since not everyone asks for it).
They'll also be able to tell you what's necessary to upload your images into your web space for the world to view.
There are also a few services that offer free image hosting for railroad-related sites.
Forum member jpcamb brought RailImages.com to my attention, and jasonboche told me about TrainWeb.org.
It may take a few days to get your account activated, but you can't beat the price! :^)
If those options aren't available, there are companies that provide image hosting for a small fee.
They became popular with the advent of online auction sites (like eBay) that don't host their own pictures, but sellers quickly figured out that people were more likely to bid if they could see what they were bidding on.
Use your favorite search engine (like Google) to look for "image hosting" or "web hosting", and I'm sure you'll find one that fits your needs.
Once you've got a place to store your images online, you'll need to upload them.
This process varies from provider to provider.
Some companies use FTP (File Transport Protocol), while others have web-based interfaces for uploading images.
Check with your hosting provider to find out how to get your images uploaded onto their server.
Once that's done, you should be able to point your web browser at one of the images in your web space, and have it load in your browser.
How? By using its URL, or Uniform Resource Locator.
It's a string of text that lets anyone, anywhere, access an object (a text file, a sound, a picture, or whatever) on the web.
It looks like this:
http://web.server.address/some_folder/maybe_another_folder/filename.ext
What's all that mean? Let's break our sample URL into its component parts:
- Protocol: The "language" to be used when the web browser is talking to the server. For the web, it's almost always the HyperText Transport Protocol, or "http" for short.
- Server Name: The server on which the image resides.
If you're using your ISP for image hosting, it's probably something like "www.myISPnameGOEShere.com" or "members.myISPgoesHERE.com"
- Path: The "path" to the file; that is, any folders (a.k.a. directories) that contain the file.
Again, if you're using your ISP, this may be your user name, or your user name with a tilde (~) in front of it, like this: "~myusername"
- File Name: The name of the file itself, which is whatever you decided to call it.
I'd recommend giving your pictures meaningful names, so you won't have to remember that "image0034.jpg" is a picture of your cat.
It would probably be easier for you to remember that a name like "Mister_Fuzzy_on_the_couch.jpg" is a picture of your cat, and it's the picture of him hacking up a hairball on your new Italian leather couch. :^)
I'd also recommend against using spaces and other "special" characters in your file names.
Why? Because they can't be used in their "natural" state without confusing web servers or browsers.
So, they have to be "encoded" using the percent sign (%) and a character code. The end result is that "Mister Fuzzy on the couch.jpg" on your desktop computer has to be referred to as "Mister%20Fuzzy%20on%20the%20couch.jpg" when the browser talks to the server, which is somewhat harder to read.
At this point, you should have your images uploaded to your web space, and you should know the server name, any path to the images, and the file name of the image you want to insert in your post.
A good test to make sure everything is working up to this point is to construct the URL for your image and enter it in the "Address" field of your web browser.
If you've done everything correctly, the image should appear in your browser, and you should pat yourself on the back because the hard part is done.
If you don't see the image in your browser, then you've got to figure out why it isn't displaying.
Is the file name correct? Do you have the correct name for the server? Did you forget some or all of the path?
Remember that uppercase and lowercase are important for the path and file name, so make sure you've got the capitalization correct as well.
If you can't get it to display here, then there's no way it's going to show up in your posts on the forum.
Adding the Image or Link to your Post
Now that the difficult task of editing and uploading your pictures is complete, adding the image or a link to the image to your post is easy.
Why? Because we've already got the most important piece of information we need, the image's URL.
You did remember the URL, right? :^)
If not, load the image in your browser again, highlight the URL in the "Address" field of your browser, and copy it to the clipboard (right-click and "Copy" for you Windows users).
Now, go to the post you're writing in the forum.
To Insert the Image into your Post:
Use the forum tags [img] and [/img] around the URL for your image, like this:
[img]http://members.myisp.com/my_username/my_layout.jpg[/img]
When you submit your post, your image will appear at the point in your text where you entered the [img] and [/img] tags.
To Insert a Link to the Image into your Post:
Use the forum tags [url] and [/url] around the URL for your image, like this:
[url]http://members.myisp.com/my_username/my_layout.jpg[/url]
When you submit your post, the URL you entered will appear as a link to your image, so folks reading the forum can simply click on it and the image will appear in a new browser window.
Final Thoughts
So, now you should be armed with all the knowledge you'll need to post images to the Atlas Model Railroad Forum.
If you want to try out your new learnings, I'd recommend using one of the pre-existing "test" threads in the Administrative Forum, or starting one of your own.
There are usually already a couple of topics (a.k.a. "threads") where people are testing new signatures and trying to post images.
This way, you won't clutter up the other forums (
N Scale,
HO Scale,
O Scale, and
DCC) with a bunch of test messages.
And, since the forum adminstrators usually read the Administrative Forum (go figure! :^) ), you can usually find someone to help you if you're still having problems.
Hopefully, this document was helpful, and you'll be sharing your images with us in no time.
If you still have questions, ask the forum, and you should be able to find someone to help you.
I consider this document a work in progress, so any input you may have regarding it is welcome.
As always, good luck, and happy modeling!
This page has been viewed 2507 times since 10 March 2003
