How do you post Yahoo photos to a messageboard?

Factual Questions
1

I joined Yahoo’s photo-hosting service because I want to post my photos to a messageboard via the url of the photo, and I’m pretty sure I saw a way to do that, but now I can’t find a link there to my photos. Did I misunderstand how photo-hosting works in general, or at Yahoo, or what? Is there a better place for what I want (for free) besides Yahoo?

2

It depends on the message board. Different boards are set up to allow (or prohibit) image posting. Those that allow it may work in different ways.

For example - it seems that the best you can do here on the SDMB is create LINK in your post just as if you were posting a link to a website.

  1. Go to Yahoo and select the pic you want.

  2. Right click the pic, and select PROPERTIES

  3. Copy the URL

  4. Come to the SDMB and create a Post.

  5. Inside the post - create a link, but where the URL usually goes, enter the Yahoo pic URL.

This pic of me and a friend is posted on a Yahoo site (yes, it is inside my office building).
Link to Yahoo hosted Pic

I hope this helps.

3

Yes. Yahoo does certain things better – such as sharing entire photo albums with other Yahoo users – but for a few message board images, I’d recommend TinyPic.

4

Yahoo does not allow deeplinking to pictures, the link in Gringo’s post does not work. I use Photobucket for posting pictures on message boards.

5

Part of my problem seems to be that some of the pictures I want to show people are saved as bitmaps, not jpegs or something that the image hosting sites accept. (My cell phone automatically saves some pictures as bitmaps, some as jpegs–I have no idea why, or how to force one over the other.)

Is there a way to change bitmaps into jpegs? When I click on the “Save As” function, bitmaps always give me two options: I can “Save as bitmap” or I can “Save as bitmap.” Very helpful.

6

Any number of graphics viewers can open in one file format and save in another. You might try IrfanView to see if it meets your requirements.

7

I’ve shared lots of Yahoo! photos here. In fact, heres’s a sample.

You have to go to the particular album you want to share and click on Privacy Settings. Choose the option Public.

I reserve one album for Public use. The whole album is available to the guest who uses the link when any photo in that album is linked to. If you want only that photo to be available you must put it in a separate Public album.

8

That’s different from directly linking to the image file. You have to load the entire webpage as opposed to just one image and you can’t use the image inline (on message boards that allow you to add an image directly to a post).

TinyPic is better because it lets you do that, it doesn’t shrink the picture dimensions the way Yahoo does, it gives you a short URL and it has the most straightforward interface – just upload and you’re done, no logging in or anything like that.

9

I would really like to know how to do this. Once–once–I tried it. I posted what was supposed to be a picture of me, in one of those Doper photo threads. But in fact, once the message was posted, when I clicked on it it linked to a Yahoo photo already posted by somebody else. Very embarrassing.

So obviously I did it wrong and I have not tried it again. It seems to be a matter of luck. I got what David Simmons posted but not Gringo Miami’s.

10

Pretend you are going to reply to my post and look in it at the coding for the link. In the Yahoo! Photos you need to click on the picture you want to link to so as to get an enlarged image. Then copy the address from the address line on your screen and use it as the link as I did in my post. And, as I said, in the album containing the picture you need to set the Privacy level at Public.

11

Okay, after I’ve downloaded IrfanView, what steps so I need to take to do a bitmap-to-jpeg conversion?

I’m kind of sorry (really) to be asking so many dumbass questions, but you’d kind of think sites would do better business making the assumption that first-time users don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground about using their site. If it weren’t for the SDMB I’d be totally screwed.

12

Open your bitmap file in Irfanview
Click “File” and choose “Save As”
Choose jpg from among the file types in the “Save as type” drop down menu.
Click “Save.”

13

Okay, you have several issues here.

First, the question of how to “post” a picture on a message board. In general, that means that you open thread X, look at post Y, and lo and behold a picture appears in post Y.

The Straight Dope does not permit the display of pictures in that manner, for reasons discussed at length in past ATMB topics.

On a board that does, you put the URL of the picture itself (as opposed to the webpage on which it is hosted) within [IMG] tags – [IMG] in front and [/IMG] afterwards (without the underscores). On boards which permit HTML coding, you use an “img src=” code in angle brackets in much the same way.

Second, you need a site which will host the pictures and permit “deep linking” to the picture itself. PhotoBucket offers free basic accounts and does precisely that – in fact, will provide you with the proper coding for each picture. TinyPic, also a PhotoBucket service, is available for hosting individual pictures on a one-shot basis, when you occasionally but rarely need to have a picture hosted. There are other such services.

It appears that Yahoo photo albums do not permit “deep linking” from what others have said here.

With a board that does allow “deep linking” you could link to (as opposed to post) a picture here, using the [URL=] coding familiar to most members. That would create a hotlink that one could use to view the picture in question.

14

I have more issues than you could possibly list. But thanks for helping me understand the smallest of them.