Reply To: Forum Code of Conduct / FAQ Thread
Q8: I’m having problems getting images to work.
A8: That’s not really a question.
Q8: I’m having problems getting images to work?
A8: Ha ha, wiseguy. There are a couple of things that might be causing the problem, depending on what you’re trying to do and what result you’re getting, but the one that arises most often is that the forum software really, really wants you to put in exactly the right kind of input, and it doesn’t cooperate otherwise, and yeah, it’s confusing, and yeah, it’s not well documented (well, read this FAQ entry and then tell me if it’s still not well documented).
I’ll try and try to simplify — you have webpages, and webpages have pictures in them. When you’re trying to use an image, the forum wants you to give it the picture itself, not the webpage with the picture in it. If you’re trying to pull a picture from a site like Flickr or Picasa, it’s very likely that what you’re looking at is the webpage, not the image itself.
Let me put it this way: The webpage is a kind of “wrapper” — it has some things that are meant for humans to use, such as letting us move to a different picture, or resize the picture, etc. But the forum software doesn’t know how to “unwrap” it, so you’ve gotta do that for it. And the way you do that is, you give it the address of the picture itself — and the way you find the address of the picture itself is slightly different, depending on what you’re using.
On a Windows machine running Mozilla Firefox, right-click on the image and choose “Copy image location.”
On a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, right-click on the image and choose “Properties.” One of the pieces of data you see should be “Address (URL)”. That’s what you want to copy.
Then come back to the forum and paste that address wherever you meant to use it.
(Tip: A lot of files have an extension, that is, the last few characters of the filename tell you which kind of file it is — for instance, “.html” is a webpage, “.doc” is a Word document, “.mp3” is a sound file. There are certain file extensions that mean “picture” — actually, there’s a pretty lengthy list, but ones you’re likely to see include “.jpg”, “.gif”, “.png”, and maybe “.bmp”, and I may have skipped some common ones but that covers most of it. So if the address you’re trying to use ends in “.html”, it probably isn’t going to work, and if it ends in “.jpg” or one of the other picture extensions, that’s probably what you’re looking for.)