How to post images in a forum thread

[Chris]

If you want to include images within your posts, you have 3 options:

Option A: include pictures at the end of the post

To do this, simply click on "Additional Options" below the text entry box and use the browse button to attach pictures to your post.  They will show up at the bottom of your post after you hit submit on the post.  Option A is quick and simple and sometimes that's good enough, but if you want your images to appear within the body of your text (especially useful for a build thread where you want to discuss each image in turn) you need options B or C

Option B: External Hosting

If your image is already on a webserver somewhere else you can include it just by using the IMG tag like this:

Details

The disadvantage is that if whoever runs that server notices traffic coming from srcmc.co.uk they may move or delete the image.  So it's normally better to use option C to host the image here.

Option C: Host the Image in the Gallery

I'm going to go into some detail with screenshots just to avoid any confusion, in reality it's not hard once you know the method.

First create an album for your attachments in the gallery, you'll see the link in the top menu bar of the site.

Details

After clicking "Gallery", click on "My Albums" and then "Add User Album"

Details

Details

Give the gallery a name which includes your own name and the word attachments.  I suggest you dedicate the gallery to attachments only and create a separate second gallery for pictures you want to be available for people to browse in the gallery.  This means you can set the permissions on your attachments folder to prevent browsing.

Details

Further down the page, click the "Check All" box so that all membergroups can see your images and change the "Disable Browsing" setting from No to Yes.

Details

Details

Hit submit and the gallery is created.  Now there are two options for adding files, "Mass Upload" and "Add an item to this gallery"

Details

You can experiment with mass upload if you like, it's a useful way to add multiple files at a time.   If you add files singly, using the "Add an item to this gallery" then the screen displayed as you hit "Submit" is this:

Details

And the key piece of info to note is the SMG ID, in this case 140.  The final step is to use the SMG ID to include your image in the post. 

Details

The various options which may be used with the SMG tag are shown here: http://www.srcmc.co.uk/forum/index.php?action=mgallery;sa=smgtaghelp

[Andy]

Before I try - can someone please confirm the system allows us to upload MPG files into the Gallery? The one I want to share is 27Mb so not too big, which should help?
Andy

[Chris]

Andy, the gallery allows video files to be added but the size limit is lower than you've mentioned.  The best option is to host the file on a dedicated video sharing site like Youtube or Vimeo and post a link in your thread, which should allow the video to be displayed in a window in the post.

If there's a reason it needs to be hosted locally on our server we can review the size limit, but the intention of the size limit is to manage the storage space we have available on the server.