Community How To: Posting Photos

This is first in a series of blog posts I'll make to help you get the most out of the community site. Please feel free to ask questions or suggest any additional topics.

There are a number of ways to share images in the community. The most obvious one is by using the Photos tab on the navigation bar. You can also access this same area from your My Page on the left side of the page.

The default view is All Photos, however you can view All Albums that have been created as well. The default "Sort by" of All Photos is Latest, but the drop down menu allows you to view shared images by Top Rated, Most Popular and Random.

At the top of the photo, you can see additional photos by the member who added the photo or you can add them as a friend. At the bottom of the photo, you can rate an image by use the 5 star option on the right. On the left you can share or make an image one of your favorites. Once you make an image a favorite it will show in your My Favorites from the Photos page. And finally you can add any comments or questions about the image at the very bottom of the page.

To add your own photos, you have a couple of options. From the main Photos tab, you can quickly add individual images by clicking Add photos. From here you can add up to 100 images from your computer and you'll want to make sure they are not more than 10mb in size each. If you already have your images in a photo service like Flickr, you can connect your Flickr account to the community and simply transfer the images over to your profile.

The final way to upload images to the community is via email. You'll also be given a unique email address that you can send any images to your profile from your cell phone.

Another option next to My Photos, is My Albums. From here you can group not only your images, but the images of others into Albums viewed from your page or the All Albums tab.

You have a number of options when building out the album, including album art, title and description. And adding images to the album is just click and drag.

Once you have created the album, it can be shared or embedded into a blog or forum post. Just click on "Get Embed Code" and copy the HTML Embed Code.

This is what you will copy into the blog post or forum post for the album slide show to display.

You'll also notice in a forum post you have the ability to attach a file and technically you could attach a photo. However if you want the images to show in your post, you should use the Add an image button in the body of the post instead of attach an image.

You have 2 options of where the image can come from, either from your computer or from an uploaded source (say an image you've already upload to your photos area). If you haven't uploaded the image, just click browse and find the image on your computer and upload.

Or find the http address of the image and add to the post via the http option. To find the http address, locate the image you want to add and right click and go to properties. Locate the Address and copy the url starting with http and ending with either jpg or gif.

This is the url you want to add to the field "or insert an existing image"

Hopefully this has cleared up any questions on posting photos, but if you do have additional questions please feel free to submit a comment below and I'd be happy to clarify any of my instructions.

Thanks!!