How to Post Photos on Forum using Photobucket

[zmcgovern45]

Overview

If you're like me, and you take a lot of photos, you want an easy way to share them online on forums such as AGO. While Autogeek does have their own photo hosting tool, I personally find it very archaic and cumbersome to use... so I don't use it.

Between my business photos (detailing) and personal photos, I take 10,000+ photos every year, so it can be a lot to keep track of. I have found Photobucket to be the quickest and easiest way for me to share my detailing photos on various forums without worrying about losing image links/photos disappearing like they previously did when I simply used facebook image links for my Show N Shine threads.



At the time of this article, Photobucket provides 10GB of free storage with their free account, which is plenty of room for a TON of images (when you do it right). I currently have 3,290 photos on my account and am using just 25% of my free 10GB of storage. This is because I do not upload at the full resolution of my 24MP camera, but rather I export them at a smaller resolution (max width 2048px) to minimize storage space while still providing a high resolution image for online posting. This is an important factor that I will not get into in this article, but I felt it was worth mentioning as it will make your storage space last a very long time compared to using full res files which will take up considerably more space.


Checking Your Settings

Before I get into showing you how easy it is to share your images from photobucket, let's go through a few account settings quickly to ensure you are set up for maximum efficiency.

Navigate to the your user settings by hovering over your profile image in the upper right corner, then clicking on the "Settings" option in the drop down menu.



Next, click on the "Albums" tab to view your album settings. We want to focus on the "links" setting that is the 3rd heading in your album settings.

You must have the "IMG Code" box checked as this will generate the bb code link to your image that will be pasted into your forum post to display your image properly. I personally turn off all other links as I do not use them, but you may leave them selected if you wish. I also recommend checking "Turn on easy linking mode" as shown below. This option will display your image links in the gallery view which makes copying & pasting many image links quicker and easier as you do not have to view each image to obtain the link (more on this later).


Inserting Images Into Forum Posts

Navigate to your photo library, or if you are like me and prefer to create specific albums, select the album you would like to view.

Now comes the easy part... copying your image links and pasting them into your forum post.

As you can see, since we turned on the "Easy Linking" setting, our thumbnails each have the IMG Code beneath them. If you chose to leave other link options selected, you will see those beneath each image as well. Simply select the IMG Code for the image you would like to insert, and paste it into the text of your post.



Alternatively, you can click on an image for a larger view instead of only viewing the thumbnails. When you are viewing the image, the IMG Code will appear on the right margin. Simply click on the code box, and it will automatically be copied to your clipboard. Then paste the code into your forum post.




That is all there is to it! Now you can quickly and easily upload your images to your photobucket account, and generate IMG Code links needed to post in the forums. Using this tool, I can quickly and easily create write ups with 50+ images without worrying about my pictures disappearing down the road.

[Angus]

Thanks for sharing, Zach! I too use Photobucket over AGO's for photo sharing. And thanks for the easy link tip. I wasn't aware of that one until now.

Do you ever post photos on Reddit? And if so, do you know which Photobucket link type works? I'd probably be more active on the Auto detailing sub section but refuse to set up a separate Imgur photo account just to post photos.

[Mike Phillips]

First, thanks for writing this article Zach, hopefully it will help to reduce the number of missing pictures in threads into the future.

At the time of this article, Photobucket provides 10GB of free storage with their free account, which is plenty of room for a TON of images (when you do it right).

And that is the key....

When you do it right

I currently have 3,290 photos on my account and am using just 25% of my free 10GB of storage.

This is because I do not upload at the full resolution of my 24MP camera, but rather I export them at a smaller resolution (max width 2048px) to minimize storage space while still providing a high resolution image for online posting.

And that is the key.... teaching people to NOT upload pictures directly off their camera memory card to ANY photo hosing website because cameras now days take HUGE file size pictures and these HUGE file size pictures eat up all the free space provided by free picture hosting websites.

Then down the road when Joe PhotoUploader runs out of free space they simply delete old pictures and leave a trail of red x's or the complimentary picture Photobucket inserts for all the pictures missing.

















It's always sad to click to a thread with a title that gets you excited for the information and pictures only to find the pictures are missing.

This is an important factor that I will not get into in this article, but I felt it was worth mentioning as it will make your storage space last a very long time compared to using full res files which will take up considerably more space.

And that's what I've been doing all my online life, trying to help others via education on how to resize their pictures using a free software program that works perfectly without distorting the pictures in any way. The original article below was posted on MOL in 2004.

Here's the current version,


How to resize your photos before uploading to a photo gallery


To everyone reading this into the future.... take the info shared by Zach and put it into practice if you're going to use free photo hosting websites like Photobucket.


Nice article.

[DeansDetailing]

Thanks so much for posting this! Having just started posting my pics to the forum I was getting tired of the tedious process of adding many pictures. Now it will be a breeze and I can create a post in MSWORD then just copy/paste and submit. SWEET! You just saved me a lot of time, Sir! KUDOS!

[SYMAWD]

Exactly how I post my pictures and the phone app is great as well.

[Chris@AutoCleanse]

Great article buddy, very informative as always.

[zmcgovern45]

Happy to help