New Orleans Eats Forums at NOLAEats.com

I just opened up the FAQs page to check out how to post pictures within a message. I don't see any instructions, but I do see this:

Registration is free (unless otherwise specified), and offers an extended range of features, including:

Posting new threads
Replying to other peoples' threads
Editing your posts
Receiving email notification of replies to posts and threads you specify
Sending private messages to other members
Creating albums of pictures and comment on others' pictures
Adding events to the forum calendar
Setting up a 'contact list' to quickly see which of your friends are online.

Very, very cool. Where are the albums? Thanks!

Albums are one of the features we elected to not turn on initially, until we had a better sense of resource requirements. We're fortunate to have a situation where we have unlimited data transfer, but our storage has limits.

Re: attaching images to posts (as in uploading to our server) , there are dimension and filesize limits, which the software will notify you if you exceed. Up to a certain size, images will be attached as-is (if they don't blow up the formatting of the board); beyond that, the software creates a thumbnail, inserts it into the post, and clicking on it opens an overlay with the larger photo.

Free hosting sites like Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasaweb are also good alternatives to host your images, and then link to them in your posts.

Ok, for your storage purposes, (and I'm hoping the forum will grow in leaps and bounds), would you prefer that we link to the sites mentioned rather than insert a picture?

JudiB wrote:Ok, for your storage purposes, (and I'm hoping the forum will grow in leaps and bounds), would you prefer that we link to the sites mentioned rather than insert a picture?

For now, yes.

I just posted an image on "Local Fun" using a picture from my own Flickr account. Is this workable for this website?

Oops! nevermind! I just noticed the remarks concerning Flickr, etc.

If your image hosting service will allow linking directly to images, it's all good with us as long as we don't get giant photos making everyone scroll left-right. We all remember how annoying that was.

We use and like Picasa from Google. You have to set up a Google account, but once you do, there are several other handy features like the Google Checkout you may have seen on some e-commerce sites.

With Picasa, you can upload images, changing the size on-the-fly, into albums that can be made public or private, and each uploaded photo has a link provided that also includes a link to a thumbnail of it as well for posting on the web, like in a forum.

Also available is a free downloadable Picasa program that will let you organize all photos on your PC, and create and directly upload photos from it to your Picasa account.

A little advice for those who like to protect their privacy: Most of the image hosting services' links to photos in your account will have your account name visible in the URL, e.g. "http://imagehost.com/johnandjanedoe/photos/...", so always give that some thought before choosing a user name. Picasa, conveniently, allows you to change your album URL to something else other than your account name. We're not sure about the others.