Posting an image is really easy once you learn how; it may look tricky, but you'll probably only need to follow this tutorial once or twice before you're a pro at it.
First, you might want to resize your image so that it's easy for other people to download and view. For Clown Forum, I suggest making sure your image is no larger than 600 pixels wide. If you need to edit or resize your image but don't have the software to do this on your computer, head over to
PXN8. You can crop, rotate, resize, zoom in, adjust the colors, get rid of red eye, and even whiten teeth, all online and free. From personal experience I recommend you always save your edited or resized photo as a new file instead of saving over the original! You never know when you'll want to return to the original and edit it again.
Once you have your image ready, you must upload it to a web server connected to the Internet. This is not the same as being on your local computer. You may already have some web server space that came with your Internet account. (Check with your Internet Service Provider to learn how to access it if so.)
If not, not a problem: there are many free services now that will allow you to upload your pictures to a web server. Here are just a couple; feel free to suggest your favorite.
Flickr
Photobucket
When you put a picture on a web server, it will have a "URL". This stands for Uniform Resource Locator" and is basically the web address. It should look something like this:
http://www.myphotoswebsite.com/mydir.../mypicture.jpg. Most of the time you can just right-click on the image you've uploaded and choose "Properties" from the menu, then highlight the URL and Copy it by hitting Control-C. Some photo hosting services will have a different procedure for getting the URL or may not allow linking to pictures hosted with their service at all; check their help pages for more information.
Once you have the URL of the picture you want to post, come back to Clown Forum and begin composing your post. To add your image, simply click on the "image" button.
A little prompt will pop up asking for your image's URL. Paste or type it in, and click ok. The code for adding your picture will appear inside the text box. You can finish typing your text and click "preview" to see if everything came out right.
OR, once you're a hotshot at posting pictures, you can skip the prompt and just type [*IMG]http://www.yourpicture'surl[*/IMG] (leaving out the *) and it will display the picture at the URL you point it to.
(As a favor to me and other webmasters out there, please do not copy an image URL directly from another site unless they specifically tell you it's ok to do so. Linking directly to a picture can sometimes cost the webmaster extra money if a lot of people view it, and can even cause legal problems if the image is copyrighted.)
That's it! Click "Submit" and you're done. Readers will see your photo when they read your message. Go ahead and post a test on this thread; I'll delete it to save room once you've got the hang of it.