How to use the Image Gallery to embed pictures in posts

[David Hodgkins]

This forum has an Image Gallery feature that allows you to create one or more picture albums and then upload pictures to populate them. Anyone who is a member of this forum can view your albums and browse your pictures. More importantly, this is a great way to store images for a build thread or any other picture you may want to embed in a post full size.

EDIT: After reading post 1 and 2, MAKE SURE you read post 19!

Attaching Pictures
There are several ways to put an image in a post. Attaching a picture to a post results in a clickable thumbnail being added either inline, or at the end of a post. If you use the inline option, it looks like this:
BodyFitting.JPG

Now, if I'm in my build thread, bragging about my mad engine turning skills and describing how I made the fire wall and speaker wall you won't know what I'm talking about until you click on the thumbnail and a pop-up displays the image in it's own window. (Go ahead, click it. I'll wait. It's an awesome shot. Come back to this point when you are through...) This image is tied to the individual post and not centrally located. With a Gallery Picture you can embed the picture in a post full size and and group them together in an album. For example, I have a build album and a general use album. If someone wants to see all my build pics - including many not included in posts - they can just --->check out my build pic album. <---

Embedding Pictures
In my general use album I have stuff that I post occasionally, like how I feel when I make a mistake:


I'll also occasionally "host" pics in my album for folks who don't know how to embed pics (hopefully I can help alleviate that with this post) or upload a screen capture to describe something, like those that follow in this post. I've found that lots of folks don't know about this feature, or don't know how to work around a small bug it has. This post explains how to create an album and add pics to it. As mentioned, there is a small bug in the system as of this writing related to multiple uploading but I'll explain the easy work-around as we go.

EDIT: This rules and recommendation list is at the bottom of post 2 but I'm adding it here as a quick reference:

• Only upload .png, .jpg or .jpeg files
• MAX pixel size is 1900x1900. I feel this is too big but it was requested. I usually re-size my pics to a max of 1024 X 768 or maybe 1200 X 800 before uploading.
• MAX image size is 2MB but the page will load a LOT slower! Reducing the pixel size to the above recommendation should result in a file size ~ 200 - 300 kb.
• The maximum number of embedded images in a post is 7

OK so to the task at hand. To access the image gallery, click on the "Gallery" button on the top navigation bar and a menu will pop up.


You can either go to your album page or go directly to the "Add Album" dialog from here. If you choose "My Albums" you will be taken to a page that displays all of your albums on this page there is a "Create New Album" button. Click it to bring up the new album dialog. Give the new album a title and description as well as set what "Type" of album it is: Public, Private or Profile. Public is for everyone to see and should be your choice.

After you create your album it will appear in your album list:


After your album is created click on it to go to the album pictures page.

The Bug
When you click the Upload Photos button the Manage Attachments dialog may come up empty. If this is your fist time uploading you will see a screen with empty panels, as shown below. But if you have uploaded pics before and this screen comes up with no thumbnail pics of previous uploads your multi file upload will fail.



The Work-Around
To work around this, go through the steps below of selecting multiple photos. If you select multiple files and then see that only one is returned to the file select dialog box, click the close buttons to return to your album. Then click the Upload Photos button again and recent pics should load into the dialog box.

Let's walk through it. From the Manage Attachments window, click the "Add Files" button. An additional little file selector window will open. Click the "Select Files" button and select multiple image files to upload:


After selecting the pics, press the "Open" button. a list of the photo titles should be returned to the file selector. If only one file is returned to the file selector box, the multi-upload will fail:


If this is the case close the File Selector box and the Manage Attachments window to return to your album. Now click the "Upload Photos" again. The Manage attachments window will appear again but this time it should load thumbnails of previous pics. like this:


continued...