Smokin-It User Forum!
Problems and Troubleshooting => Having a problem? Look Here First, or Post Your Question! => Topic started by: DivotMaker on December 26, 2013, 08:04:26 PM
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Some folks have a hard time posting pictures to their posts, so here's a little tutorial on how I do it on a PC. I can't address the Mac, so the Mac folks will have to get together and post instructions for the Apple crowd.
Taking pictures:
I use my phone, an HTC One, to take all my Q pics. It's set to hi-def, so I have to edit the pictures to a reasonable size for the forum. (You can have up to 10 pictures per post, and they have to be 1111KB or less in size).
Once I've taken the pictures, I email them to myself from my phone. If you have a USB transfer utility, this would work, too. The idea is to get them from your phone or digital camera onto your computer. If you have a memory card reader on your computer, you could use this option for a digital camera.
Where to store them:
I have a folder under "Pictures" called BBQ Pictures. Simple enough - all the good Q shots in one place!
Modify them, if necessary:
Like I said, my pictures are too big for posts. The idea is to size them so they fit within the post without scrolling.
To change the size, I open the folder my pictures are in and right-click on the picture I want to use. I then left-click on the menu item "Edit." In Windows, this opens the picture in Paint. Here, I select "Resize" and change the height and width from 100 to "50." This cuts the size in half (this ratio may be different for your pictures, so it may require a little experimentation).
Then, I usually use the box "select" tool to frame the meat of the shot (no pun intended), then crop the picture. This cuts out all the junk and empty space in the picture, and draws your attention to the meat.
When done editing, be sure to "save" the picture!
Posting pictures in your posts:
Now that you have your "magazine-quality" sized and edited pictures of your smoky food for the gods, you have to get them in the post ('cause we love 'em)!
When you are in the New Post section, and hammering away, you'll see "Attachments and Other Options" below the text box you are typing in. Click on it.
Options and an "Attach" box open below. Here, you can select options to notify you of replies, etc. Below the options, it says "Attach." Click "Browse" in the attachment box, and find your masterpiece Q shot. Once you have the picture you want to post, just double-click on it to insert it in the Attach box. If you have more than one picture (I hope you do), click on "(more attachments)" below the Attach box - this will open another Attach box.
If you make a mistake, just click (Clear Attachment) and select a new one. This will work with pdf files also.
When you have all of your pictures attached, click "Post" on the lower right and it's done! The Preview mode doesn't show your pictures, so you have to see them in the live post. When you go to the post, see if everything looks right. If not, click Modify and make any necessary changes.
This is what works for me. If anyone has a simpler method, please let me know!
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As an added "easy button" for transferring the pictures to a PC/Mac, use Drop box. Once set up on the device and your PC/Mac, you can go to that folder to select the pictures you want. You will still have to resize them per Tony's instructions but you won't have to do the whole process of email/cable transfer. Just my 2 cents.
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Good tip, Ben! I use Dropbox, but haven't messed with it for the forum pics. The whole "cloud" thing still escapes me a bit...I get all kinds of duplicates between the phone and computer(s) on Dropbox. Guess I need to figure out how to minimize that! That's probably one reason I like my pics local to edit and save. I guess Apple folks could do the same with iCloud.
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Yup it can be a bit duplicating but that is exactly the point. Your pics are in the cloud and you don't have to do the transfers. Plus you always have a backup of what you took incase you ever lost the phone or what not. I love dropbox for taking pictures since I don't have to worry about transferring to my PC first. Just edit/resized and post. They are always there until I delete them. Great tool for foodies.
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All-
I have a mac, Here is what I do to post pictures is the following:
Take pictures with my smartphone (Windows Nokia 920)
then I send to my home email address.
Save the pictures to my mac.
I then go to the smokinit forums and hit the attachment and other options and then follow the directions.
I found this works because uploading from iphoto the pictures are too large.
Ed
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This seems to work for me:
1. Take pictures with phone
2. Email them to my PC
3. Copy from email to a File folder somewhere
4. Right click on all the pics you want to share "Send To" > "Mail Recipient, a pop-up shows up asking for picture size and I just choose "Smaller: 640 x 480" then hit the attach button.
5. At which point it opens outlook with all the resized files attached. I copy from email and to File Folder called "Smaller" or something to that effect, then instead of sending the email I delete it.
6. Attach the pictures to Forum using normal process.
Results are JPG in the 35-55KB range and seem to post to forum pretty well. Plus I like that I can select a bunch of files and it just does conversion on all of them at once.
I'm sure there are 100s of ways to do this, just thought I'd share the way I do it...
Wik
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Thanks Wik! More info is good!
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For you MS Office 2010 users if you open the picture in the picture manager, click on edit, and then compress, you can save images in a web compatible format that meets the SI web standard.
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Thanks Bob!
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For all of you MAC folks, here is a very easy way to resize and post your pictures. (Come over to the dark side. You will never be happier nor will you ever go back to the "evil PC" world.)
I also use Dropbox since it automatically pulls my new photos off of my iPhone whenever I sync it to my Mac, but it doesn't matter, just get your photos into a folder somewhere.
1. Open Finder and navigate to the folder where your current smoking pictures are stored. (I create a folder for each of my smokes with the type of meat and the date, but that is just me.)
2. Click on each photo file and name it something that makes sense (a description of the photo & date seems logical)
3. In Finder, create another folder called "Small", or something like that. This will be a temporary folder.
4. In the original folder with the photos, left click on the first file, hold down the Shift key and then left click on the last file (this will highlight all of the photo files). Right click and select Copy.
5. Right click on the "Small" folder and select Paste. Now all of your photos should be in the "Small" folder.
6. Drag the entire "Small" folder down onto the Preview App icon on your desktop. This will open Preview and will display all of your photos in the left border area of the app.
7. In Preview, while holding down the Command key, left click on every photo in the left border until all of them have been selected.
8. In the top tool bar of Preview, select Tools, Adjust Size. A pop-up window should appear.
9. In the attribute that says "Fit Into", select the scroll tab to the right, then "640x480"
10. Select OK in the bottom right of the pop up window. The window should close. Minimize Preview.
All of your photos should now be re-sized so that they are easily viewable on the forum. You can now attach the photos at the end of your post by navigating to the "Small" folder.
After attaching my photos to a post, I go back to the "Small" folder and delete all of the photos so that the folder will be cleaned out and ready to use for the next time that I need to attach photos to a post.
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Thanks for the Mac tips, Ravel! And, no, you will never lure me to the dark side...PCs Rock! ;) ;D ;D
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Thanks for the Mac tips, Ravel! And, no, you will never lure me to the dark side...PCs Rock! ;) ;D ;D
You won't lure me either. But I may be biased since I work for Microsoft.
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Easy Iphone resizing instructions --- How i posted pics that were a good size for a message board
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-Took pics with iphone.
-Email them to yourself with iphone (i use gmail). You can only attach one at a time within an email, but can attach multiple pictures in one email. When you hit send it will give you the option of resizing pics to Original, Large, Medium, or Small. Medium works very well (640x480) and doesn't overwhelm anyones computer screen.
-Get into your email on Comp
-Save pictures (to whatever folder you save your pictures in. I started a BBQ folder on desktop.)
-Attach them to message.
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I found this very simple and you can bypass any programs to resize pics.
EXAMPLE OF SIZE: http://smokinitforums.com/index.php?topic=2691.0 (http://smokinitforums.com/index.php?topic=2691.0)
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Thanks for the iPhone tips, Jason!
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Here's another tip for picture sizing. If you upload it to the forum (or another service like imgur.com) and then click on the picture you will get the pictures URL. Copy the URL and make a cross reference to it within your text by clicking the "Insert Image" button and pasting the URL into the dialog box. Then click the "Toggle View" button and you should see your URL encoded within [ img ] [ /img ] tags. If you want to size the image to a nicely viewable size you can add a width parameter to the [ img ] tag such as this [ img width=800 ]. This will make your image 800 pixels wide and fit on the screen. It also allows you to put it inline with your text and then you can talk about your pictures with the words surrounding them.
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I'm also an MSFT employee, but store all of the pictures I'm going to share on picasa - the embedding and resizing is brain dead simple and picasa albums are also integrated with android phones.
I'd say 8/10 pictures posted on the forum are monstrosities which I can only see a small portion of my my monitors, having people post properly sized pics would be really great.
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+1 with Josh on Picasa. It's awesome photo organizer. If I'm gonna upload photos on here I batch export them in Picasa. When you click on export you can choose your "Resize to:" in pixels and make it much easier to upload on these forums. I usually recommend 800 pixels for resizing.
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I also like Picasa, but find the simplicity of resizing in MS Paint quicker.
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I use irfanview and batch resize the pictures to save time. irfanview is free.
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I guess it all depends on what you're planning on doing with the pictures. Paint and irfanview are great tools for local/batch operations like vacation or family photo management. But I see them both as overkill for something like a cell phone picture of the meal that I just want to share with forum buddies.
In the end, I think the goal would be finding something simple to learn/use so that the pictures posted on the forum are of an appropriate size. Maybe just a forced re-size function built into the attachment feature would be a good alternative?
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Maybe just a forced re-size function built into the attachment feature would be a good alternative?
This software has that capability. One of my other forum sites uses this version of software and pictures are resized for viewing by the forum site.
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I guess it all depends on what you're planning on doing with the pictures. Paint and irfanview are great tools for local/batch operations like vacation or family photo management. But I see them both as overkill for something like a cell phone picture of the meal that I just want to share with forum buddies.
In the end, I think the goal would be finding something simple to learn/use so that the pictures posted on the forum are of an appropriate size. Maybe just a forced re-size function built into the attachment feature would be a good alternative?
My problem is that one picture is just not enough! I try to contribute by adding step by step instructions and step by step photos. I am a self professed computer expert and photoshop guru. This smokinitforum handles images very poorly relative to other forums I sometimes frequent. This forced me to come up with the easiest, laziest, most effective way to move pictures from my phone to this forum. The result was irfanview since I did not have photoshop on all of my computers and I never know when I want to upload stuff to this forum. With irfanview, I have a free and standardized way to select a bunch of pictures, format it down to 1000 pixels, resample down to the appropriate resolution, and have everything in one directory for me to select and upload photos.
Additionally, I use dropbox to upload photos automatically and have them available locally on the hard drive for irfanview to digest into smaller photos for me to upload.
again, all this so that I can be as lazy as possible :) and cheap.
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If you are using your phone for photos you easily resize them on your phone with an app.
For the Iphone try out Simple Resize By tekunodo.
Resize your photo.
It's free, easy to use, just try it!
How to use
1. Choose photo from your library / Take a picture.
2. Set saved photo size.
3. Save.
(https://www.smokinitforums.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi375.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Foo191%2Fgregbooras%2Fiphone_zps5gxsowla.jpeg&hash=694c1a9e59515178f01a4bfb03e98404b1dbe442) (http://s375.photobucket.com/user/gregbooras/media/iphone_zps5gxsowla.jpeg.html)
If you are you using an android phone look for Photo & Picture Resizer by farluner
How Smart Image Resizer works:
1) select the picture
2) the picture resizer displays the selected photo
3) select the resolution (width x height) from the list
4) the selected picture is reduced and displayed
Smart Image Resizer Features:
* Absolutely free
* Original pictures are not touched
* Resized pictures are automatically saved in the 'Pictures/PhotoResizer' directory
* Very good quality of the resized photos
* Photos resized several times do not lose quality
(https://www.smokinitforums.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi375.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Foo191%2Fgregbooras%2Fandroid_zpsl1z6hinh.png&hash=c8e0593c8777a6c73d0e6aac8e3f7a78d66e8b31) (http://s375.photobucket.com/user/gregbooras/media/android_zpsl1z6hinh.png.html)
Greg
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Update: Ben, the IT guy, loaded a mod to resize photos. It will now automatically set the max width to 680 px. Tried uploading a really big photo today, and it worked great! Thanks Ben!!
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Thanks Ben and Tony! This should really help out quite a bit!
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The quiet "Oz" of this site.
Sounds like a good improvement.
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Thank you Tony and Ben.
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The 'Insert Image' button provides the tags, but placing the URL between the tags does not work.
Are attachments the only way to insert pictures ?
URL used: http://www.3dpilots.com/bbq/CB-Brisket-Sliced.jpg
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I believe that I have corrected the issue with pictures and will be making another backup of the site tonight. Thank you to all who posted help and solutions. It would appear that one of the updates moved some folders and changed the permissions for those folders. I have restored the images and hope everything is working again.
Thanks,
Ben
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Here’s hoping.
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Success with iPhone. Will try on iMac tonight.
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My first Butt:
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OK, so that worked. Just had to click post many times!