You might notice, the majority of photos posted to Planet-9 are posted right into the posting in the thread. There are however instances where people DO post large images, which causes them to be hosted but not displayed in the thread - what's displayed then is a thumbnail of the image(s) - requiring a few additional steps for readers to see the photos. We'd like to avoid that - having to click the thumbnail results in a lot of images going unseen due to the additional clicks needed and the loading time of the photos. People just don't want to bother.
So - is there a solution to this?
Yes - there is. The solution is to crop and resize the photos BEFORE posting them to the forum.
How to do that?
It's actually quite simple - and there are a few options:
First, we'll assume Windows OS and working on a PC or laptop. You want to get the free software "IrfanView:. IrfanView is a very powerful image editing tool, in particular very useful for cropping and resizing images.
IrfanView can be found FREE at:
IrfanView - Official Homepage - One of the Most Popular Viewers Worldwide
- it's available as a 32-bit and 64-bit program. Download it and install it with the default options.
Now - grab the source of your image
- if it's from your phone you need to get it transferred to your PC to work with it. In the Android world there are usually options to use cloud storage to keep photos accessible. Cloud storage can be set up to share its info between the phone and the Windows PC. So - you already have the image available to you on the PC via the cloud.
If you're a Luddite - you may do a USB file transfer of the photo from your phone to your PC. Save it somewhere you'll remember to look for it. In either case - open the photo using IrfanView (if IrfanView is set to be the default program used for photo editing, double-clicking on the file will usually open Irfanview and the file at the same time.)
I'm also been known to email myself the photos from my phone - and open the email in Windows on the PC with IrfanView.
With the image in Irfanview - you first want to
crop
the image.
Using the mouse, click and move your cursor to select the part of the photo that's important to your posting. Eliminate extraneous/distracting stuff and concentrate on the significant part of the photo. The area inside the rectangle is what will be retained. Anything outside the rectangle will be removed, an example:
Use the key-combo of CTRL/Y to complete the cropping. The image will automatically resize to fill the editing window:
The next step is to
resize
the image
to one suitable for a forum posting. In general - the image should have its horizontal dimension (across the image) set to 1000 pixels. You do that in IrfanView by selecting the "Resize/Resample" tool with
CTRL/R:
Make sure the
"Preserve Aspect Ratio (Proportion)"
is checked.
The important part of this dialog box is
"Set new size:" "Width:"
Enter 1,000 into the Width entry field and you'll see the image being resized proportionally - ie - the height changes automatically so the image isn't distorted. Make sure the "Preserve Aspect Ratio (Proportion)" is checked.
Hit E
nter
(or OK) and the image will resize.
At this point, the image is ready to either paste into your message or save AND paste into your message. With your post open a browser window, in editing mode here on Planet-9, switch to IrfanView - and click the image with your mouse (and release) and use
CTRL/C
to copy the image to your clipboard.
Switch to the browser you have Planet-9 open in, and to the posting you're editing, click your mouse where you want the image to appear in the posting - look for the cursor - and hit the key combo of
CTRL/V
-
paste
. The image will appear in your posting. No need to name it or do anything else to it.
This process - once you've done it a few times becomes a REALLY easy and fast way to drop photos into forum posts (it works on almost any forum..)
_
One other technique worth learning - if you want to copy an image from another thread/forum/posting - have that post open in another browser window: Click on the image (in the browser) you want to borrow - and hit
CTRL/C
to copy it to the clipboard.
Then go to IrfanView and paste it if you intend to edit it or annotate it using the key combo of
CTRL/V
which will paste it into Irfanview.
Do whatever editing you want to the image, and again use
CTRL/C
to copy the result to your clipboard, and in the Planet-9 post editing window in your browser, click where you want the image to go and hit
CTRL/V
.
Easy - peasy..
BTW - to see what a difference cropping and resizing makes to image size - take a look at the bottom of each screen capture above. The numbers there are the size of the image, the compressed size (in bytes) of the image, and the effective size of the image (in bytes). You can imagine how much longer it would take to load the top image (45Mb) in a browser window vs the last image (2.2Mb).. and then imagine that time tripled for 3 images. It's worth doing a bit of prep work on images before posting them here! And thanks for taking the time to read this and perhaps try doing it.
