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gwtamara

Photo Upload Testing

gwtamara
11 years ago

Hey kids,

We are currently testing direct photo uploading to our forums. You are certainly welcome to link from off-site photo albums, but we hope that many of you will find being able to upload a resized photo to our servers an easy and convenient way to share your photos.

You will find instructions below the posting window.

Please let me know if you have any questions or run into any issues.

Best,

Tamara

GardenWeb Community Manager

Comments (67)

  • WalnutCreek Zone 7b/8a
    11 years ago

    Testing.

  • mustangs81
    11 years ago

    Darn, all I could find was a picture of Lily with her new fishing pole...

  • Lars
    11 years ago

    Picture of epiphyllum, blooming in my pergola:

    Lars

  • compumom
    11 years ago

    Testing...It's all about Dinner!

  • compumom
    11 years ago

    Thanks Tamara, it's a great new widget!

  • mustangs81
    11 years ago

    Thanks Tamara, I'm eager to use this new widget. Love the opportunity for random picture posting.

    Beautiful flower Lars! And equally as beautiful grandbabies Ellen.

    Just to be on subject of food--I should have mentioned that Lily is fishing for dinner.

  • magothyrivergirl
    11 years ago

    I don't see any pictures here ~ are we suppose to see pics on this thread?

  • Jasdip
    11 years ago

    Don't you normally see the WFD pics, Magothyrivergirl? You should be able to see these as well.

  • lindac
    11 years ago

    Testing....one...two....three....

  • magothyrivergirl
    11 years ago

    I always see pictures on all the forums at GW - but not on this thread. I don't even see a blank space where the picture should be.
    I don't see ads either - so maybe you have to see the ads to see the pictures????
    I also disabled Adblock on this page - still no pictures.

  • foodonastump
    11 years ago

    Mago, so I guess you'll miss out on this delicious pilaf. Oh well! ;-)

    Seriously though I think this is a great feature that will probably benefit other forums even more than this one.

  • trudy_gw
    11 years ago

    Neat....much easier posting photos!
    If you wonder why I dont post much in the summer, this is what I do instead of cooking.....growing hosta seedlings!

  • pkramer60
    11 years ago

    Great photos, except for the maggoty one.

  • annie1992
    11 years ago

    Ok, trying again....

  • coconut_nj
    11 years ago

    Foodona, you are reallly, realllly bad! Annie, you did it!! And the pic doesn't even look..well you know.. LOL

  • coconut_nj
    11 years ago

    Um, my pic was too big so I put one that was smaller on it..but...it didn't do anything nice to it. LOL Referring to the alligator pic.

    Trying a smaller pic of Fluffy on this one.

  • coconut_nj
    11 years ago

    Ok, that one worked fine. Just trying one more to see if this size pic will be a go. My Mother at the place where Einstein used to pass by on his daily walks and nod hello to me. Mom told me to leave him alone, but I was an awful friendly kid.

  • annie1992
    11 years ago

    coconut, you talked to Einstein?!!!? Now THAT'S a conversation starter if I ever heard one.

    Yes, I finally beat my computer into submission but it took all darned day!

    Annie

  • coconut_nj
    11 years ago

    LOL, I yelled hello, hello to him until he acknowledged me with a nod or a little wave. We lived outside of Princeton on this fairly busy road so he used to take his daily walks there. I imagine so that he would be left alone more. I was three to five when we lived there. It's one of my youngest memories. This guy in black coat, white hair and me standing on the fence hi'ing him. Probably that hair attracted me. LOL. I used to wait for him like a faithful dog. That's also probably what got to him. My daily persistence.

    I hear ya about the pic. I only had that one pic that looked right. Luckily I don't mind my photobucket.

  • dcarch7 d c f l a s h 7 @ y a h o o . c o m
    11 years ago

    Einstein got all his historic theoretical physics inspirations on his daily walk to work. The Theory Of Relativity, The Four Dimension, his mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, ------- Basically he completely changed Newtonian physics and our understanding of reality.

    However, he was very troubled that he was never able to resolve the ultimate cosmic mystery of the Unified Field Theory, he came very close to it, but every time he got close to the answer as he was walking, there was this persistent little naughty kid yelling at him, taunting him and distracting him.

    Our world would be very different today if it weren't for that little mischievous kid.

    dcarch :-)

  • mustangs81
    11 years ago

    Too funny DC!!!

    Coco, I love that picture.

  • Jasdip
    11 years ago

    Hahahahahhahahahaa DCarch!!!!!

  • magothyrivergirl
    11 years ago

    Yay! I see pictures! I had to unblock GW from the automatically load images in Java. If I start getting unwanted ads, etc. it will be listed as blocked again....and I won't see your beautiful pictures.

    I hope this isn't another way for GW to gain more control and blast us with unwanted content after they get us hooked on this easy photo system.

  • ravencajun Zone 8b TX
    11 years ago

    I always resize my pictures any way to make load times faster since some are still on dialup.
    If you happen to have windows XP there is a very small add on you can install from microsoft which will allow you to resize any picture on your computer. Once you have it when you right click on the picture there will be the resize options you can pick a size offered or choose to use a custom size. The resize tool can be found at the powertoys page.
    I have put the page link below. Simply go to the one called image resizer and download and install.

    There's also one for windows 7 here

    http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/image-resizer-powertoy-clone-for-windows-7vista/

    Here is a link that might be useful: Resizer

  • Jasdip
    11 years ago

    Okay, Raven, you're going to have to explain THAT picture!
    LOL

  • ravencajun Zone 8b TX
    11 years ago

    Thanks Tamara for the new option it will be very useful. I have been trying out new hosting services for my pictures and not finding one I love. I have used image Shack for years but they have changed policy recently, photobucket is ok when it wants to work.
    This new option definitely helps!
    By the way I can once again access GW from my cell phone! WooHoo!

  • annie1992
    11 years ago

    LOL, dcarch. I'd rather play with naughty little children than know about the Unified Field Theory anyway, so don't worry coconut. (grin)

    Annie

  • ravencajun Zone 8b TX
    11 years ago

    Jasdip it is a dog with a purse!!! What more do you need? LOL
    It's one of my favorite pictures and the dog could be a sibling of my little one!

  • foodonastump
    11 years ago

    Ok, can someone help me with resizing so that I can post a NICE picture? I'm sure others will have this question, too.

    In the sites linked in the instructions, resizing seems to mean reduce by a percentage of size, or fit to a particular resolution, or number of pixels... none of which seem to have a clear correlation to get down to the 250kb limit. How do you get there, short of trial and error?

    I took a picture at the lowest resolution offered by my phone, and aside from being a grainy mess it was still about 4 times the limit. Yet there are some really clear pictures above.

  • dedtired
    11 years ago

    I love that the larger pics open in a new tab. I wish all the links on GW did that. I get frustrated by looking through someone's photo album or whatever and then having to back space over and over to get get back to the forum. If it's too much, I just reopen GW.

    I vote for all links opening in a new tab!

  • annie1992
    11 years ago

    FOAS I just guessed, made it 50% of the size it was and it opened up fine. At least for me, I don't know how it looks on anyone else's computer....

    Annie

  • pat_t
    11 years ago

    Just testing...

  • pat_t
    11 years ago

    Cool! That's me carving a 50lb. block of ice into an angelfish in culinary school.

  • foodonastump
    11 years ago

    I just looked through some WFD threads and found that most of those pictures, even the huge glorious ones, are under 250kb. So I looked at some of my own (and was reminded why I rarely post pictures anymore, LOL) and they were similarly sized. My conclusion is that hosting sites, such as picturetrail in my case, significantly compress the pictures. But they seem to do that without turning them into small pictures or having any immediately noticable impact on quality.

    So here's a test. I copied BWJ's rice dish from the cookalong onto my hard drive (I chose hers because it looks SO darn good, esp for a rice dish) and I'm going to post it here. It's about 160kb. If this posts a nice big ol' picture - and even if it's small - I'm wondering how to get from camera to that point without using an online host as the middle man.

  • foodonastump
    11 years ago

    Ok, so it came out small. You have to click on it to get it big. That's fine. But how to compress without reducing size, which seems to be an unneccesary step.

    Sorry for carrying on... this stuff is so foreign to me and I should probably just shut up.

  • ann_t
    11 years ago

    FOAS, the photos posted on this thread are all Thumbnails.

    If you aren't happy with Photobucket, or whatever host you are using, you might try Smugmug. I switched from PIcturetrail to Smugmug back in 2004.

    With Picturetrail I kept receiving price increases if I surpassed a certain number of photos. I was paying for 1500 and only had 700 but they wanted me to upgrade. Apparently in order to have 1500 photos you have to reduce the original size before uploading to Picturetrail.

    With Smugmug I don't have to reduce size before uploading and I have unlimited picture uploading. I have over 18 GB of photos saved to Smugmug.

    When sharing photos here on GW or other sites I have a choice of posting different sizes, from thumbnails up to 3X's. I usually post medium or large. And large is less than the 250kb.

    I looked at a few photos on WFD and there are just a few members posting photos that although they don't look larger than other photos, are 400KB and higher.

    Ann

  • ravencajun Zone 8b TX
    11 years ago

    If you read my post up above I gave directions for installing a small add on to windows that allows you to resize any pictures by simply right clicking on the picture, you then have the original and the resized pictures on your pc which you can then browse to and select to use here.

    As was mentioned by Tamara all the pictures will be displayed as thumbnails which will redirect to the full size when clicked. The reason for this is to keep the images small in the thread so that the pages load faster.
    Using the resizer addon is the easiest way to go.
    I provided links to the one for use on XP and another for use with Vista and 7.

  • doucanoe
    11 years ago

    I really like the idea!

    However all of my photos are larger than 250K so I was not successful with any I tried.

    I am not computer savvy enough to know how or if I can reduce the size of the photos to 250k.

    Linda

  • foodonastump
    11 years ago

    Thanks, ravencajun, I'll check that out. However, as "beta testers" I think the goal is to provide feedback and wishlists. Perhaps the add-on you linked simplifies the process of getting down to 250k. If so, maybe that's a better route for GW to suggest than to go to the currently linked sites where it seems - at least to me at first glance - to be a hit or miss operation to get within the limits.

    Prefacing this next thought with an admission that I'm technologically ignorant. That said, the part I'm unclear on is how this saves upload time. Right-click on any of the images above to get byte size, then click the link to the full size picture and do the same, and it's the same exact byte size. In my mind a "thumbnail" should be a low-byte rendition of the picture. If it's not that, then what are we saving here, beyond possibly screen space?

    Back to wishlists - I think ideally GW would take any size photo and do what they need to in order to get it down to size. THAT would make life easy.

  • lindac
    11 years ago

    *sigh*....I thought it applied to all forums....tried to use the "widget" to upload to Antiques forum....wasn't an option.....

  • ritaotay
    11 years ago

    With Windows XP you can resize your pics by right clicking on the pic, go to Send To and select Mail Recipient... You will then have the option of making your pic smaller... It will come up as an Attachment in an e-mail... From there you can drag the Attachment to another folder or your desktop then delete the e-mail.

    If you are using your cell phone to take pics to post on the internet make sure you turn off your GPS first !!!... There are bad people out there who can retrieve the GPS coordinates from the pic and find out just where the pic was taken, down to the room in your house!

    Hugs,
    Rita

  • agmss15
    11 years ago

    Testing.

  • Jasdip
    11 years ago

    Like LindaC, when I saw this here, first thing I did was run over to the KT and try it. No Browse button. My hopes were dashed. LOL

  • K8Orlando
    11 years ago

    Testing: limes on my tree

    Direct photo posting will be a nice feature. Hope it gets rolled out to other forums soon. Seems odd though that if you make any alteration to the message you lose the picture when you preview it again.

  • riverrat1
    11 years ago

    Testing... Following mustangs idea! The only picture I could find was a picture of my sweet Lette with her Daddy ;-) In preview the picture looks a bit distorted? Oh well, we'll see.

  • eandhl
    11 years ago

    testing

  • Richard (Vero Beach, Florida)
    11 years ago

    Crazy idea? Instead of auto-inserting the image at the end of the post, hand the user the code and let them insert it wherever they'd like. That would also make it possible to upload more than one image per post. Or would that complicate it too much for some users?

    Here's a copy of my uploader so you can see what I mean. Nothing fancy but it seems to work, knock on wood.

    Remember, it is just a test though and may vanish anytime. Actually, I suspect my electricity will flash and go out for five hours again about the time I post this just to embarrass me. :)
    Share an image?

  • Lars
    11 years ago

    Chuggerguy, that looks a lot like Lynn Canyon in British Columbia, but I haven't been there for a few years. I used to go there a lot in the 1980s.

    Myi picture shows some succulents that I have before I removed the dreaded oxalys. I forget what the stick plants are called, the green ones remind me of the Prometheus movie that I saw last week-end.

    Lars

  • bbstx
    11 years ago

    I have found that if I amend my message before posting, I have to re-attach the photo. For example, while previewing my message which includes a photo, I notice that I have misspelled a word. I scroll down, correct the word, and hit "Preview message" again. My photo is no longer included in the preview. I have to scroll down and re-upload the image.

    Is this just a quirk in the uploader or am I doing something wrong?

  • Jasdip
    11 years ago

    Nope you're not doing anything wrong, bbstx. I got in the habit of writing my message first, then attaching a photo.

    If any adjustments need to be made after, like I just did, the photo has to be re-attached.

    I've been sitting here tinkering, wondering if I can attach multiple pics to one message, but I can't.

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