RideForum.NET

A thread for me to test features around posting pictures.

I think none of you actually cares about this except when you want to post a picture--then you just want it to "work". But hopefully you can appreciate the complexities involved.

First, about the only real cost I have in hosting the forum is disk space. Right now, the space needed barely ever grows--just the occasional attachment. If it was easy to upload photos directly from your computer into a post--and presumably store them on the forum web server, my disk space requirements could grow rapidly.

The other "trend" that is in play is the idea that folks post the photos they care about online already--Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Picasa, Smugmug, etc, etc. Why would they want to re-upload their photos when they can "easily" embed them in a post using that remote host as the picture source.

However, reality is for many folks--myself included--I just have a quick photo or 2 that I want to share with the forum community...and my pictures are not hosted anywhere already. It then becomes a hassle to upload them to a sharing system first and figure out the correct embed URL (which some photo systems make incredibly difficult to figure out).

There is actually a real need here for someone to develop a phpBB mod to make photo embedding dead simple. PhpBB is the most popular forum system in the world.

The developers behind AdvRider actually created Smugmug to solve this problem for their incredibly popular and custom forum system.

So I tried to use the attachment link as the source of an embedded image--which works when the picture is not too big...but is not a simple solution for people--you'd have to have an unrealistic understanding of these things.
Luc, when I tried to embed my cool photo (a large, high-quality image), I got this failure:

Your images may only be up to 1500 pixels high.
Your images may only be up to 1024 pixels wide.

This makes sense because images that are too large will not be very viewable by folks with normal screens--worse on mobile devices.

BUT...there is no reason the forum can't be "smart" and scale the displayed image to something that fits better. I'm actually surprised phpBB has not evolved to this point. Argh.

I made some configuration changes...let's try to upload an image for embed in this post...

That worked!

Use the "Upload attachement" feature below the main text area. Select to "place inline".

It was a really large photo. I configured the forum to create a 800px wide "thumbnail" to ensure the result is something that fits in the layout. ...Still a bit wide for this layout....so thinking about better solutions to this "problem".

Let's try to embed a large photo...

So based on the large photo embedded in the previous post, you can see why it's important to somehow limit how big images can be......and I can do that by automatically generating "thumbnails" to display instead of the raw image.

If you click the image, it will open the full, raw, uploaded image.

Like this...

Thanks Troy! I will experiment sometimes soon

The last one is the best so there is no scrolling.
Since you're cleaning house can you make the avatar feature a whole lot easier?
Thanks

Savage wrote:The last one is the best so there is no scrolling.

That is why it is the last one. Isn't it odd that you always find what you are looking for in the last place you look?

Savage wrote:Since you're cleaning house can you make the avatar feature a whole lot easier?
Thanks

Done. You should find it easy to upload your avatar image now.

Nice! Good work!

My KLR is used your upload feature below.
My daughter I linked to my photobucket.
So is it OK to use the upload feature below and it doesn't use your webspace, or memory or whatever its called?

Savage wrote:My KLR is used your upload feature below.
My daughter I linked to my photobucket.
So is it OK to use the upload feature below and it doesn't use your webspace, or memory or whatever its called?

The direct upload does use the disk space I pay for, and if becomes popular, could add up to a lot of space someday. $$$ But no worries--I want folks to use whatever method is easiest for them and to get the most from this forum. My apologies for having been lazy with the system rather than working to improve it.

Cool picture of the kid, btw!

Notice how your Photobucket-sourced picture is "too big" and thus has scrollbars in this forum layout? That is the crap I wish could be auto-magically adjusted. ...and it can be--it's actually very easy, but this forum system tries to just blindly display whatever image you provide without doing simple things to ensure it fits.

Yes, I can improve these things, but not sure how far into the weeds I want to dive. I am going to look into this, though.

The photo you direct uploaded (attachment) works well because the forum generated a 700 pixel wide "thumbnail" and displayed that instead.

Agreed.
That upload feature is nice because you can see the whole pic, but if you really want to zoom in and see what grips I'm using, you can.
Nice!

FIXED. Now, whether you upload directly or embed using an external source such as Photobucket, the max width in the forum is 700 pixels, which fits.

testing

Testing from my phone.