Posting Images to Forums - Google Drive Hosting

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Cantus
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Posting Images to Forums - Google Drive Hosting

Post by Cantus »

Someone asked me about using Google Drive (available with a free Gmail account) to host images that can then be embedded in a forum post. Because this may be useful to others, I'll post the answer here:

1) This walkthrough assumes that you have a Gmail account. If not, here is information on creating a Gmail account.

2) Log into Gmail, click on the "Google Apps" icon in the upper right (looks like a 3x3 grid of dots), and select "Google Drive" from the popup menu:

<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1xRPrDz_ ... DtJMuBGk6C">

(Alternatively, you can just go directly to drive.google.com and sign in with your Gmail email address and password.)

3) Upload the picture(s) you want to embed in a forum post to your Google Drive. You can do this by dragging and dropping the files or through other methods.

4) Right click on the image you wish to embed. Click "Get shareable link"

<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1MsyXAHA ... XL11-Dpyn3">

5) Click to switch on Link Sharing

<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1Sjw1lUT ... sB8GN7U6fG">

6) Select and copy the link

<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1WVhEPyy ... IpSiM7srs8">


7) The link you copied takes you to the Google Drive photo viewer web app. This is NOT a direct link to the actual image file, so it can't be embedded in a forum post. But you can easily change the link.

In the example above, what I copied when I shared an image was the following (if you click it, you'll see that you're taken to the Google Drive photo viewer):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1w97S7rymYLXIgGzdsupwJEkTBoOGMJxn

If you change the word "open" to "uc", you will now have a link directly to the image file, which can be embedded in a forum post:

https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1w97S7rymYLXIgGzdsupwJEkTBoOGMJxn

So at the spot in your forum post that you want to embed an image, type:

Code: Select all

<img src="PasteImageLinkHere">
Be sure to paste the link you copied in the previous step between the quotes, and change "open" to "uc".

Make sure that the check box for "Disable HTML in this post" is not checked before submitting your forum post. Note that the BBCode [img] tag does not seem to work properly in our forums, so I've used the HTML img tag instead.


This is how I do it. There may be better/easier options for free image hosting. If so, please reply with details!
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Sunnie
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Post by Sunnie »

I used to use tinypic a lot until they discontinued that service. Imgur works well and doesn't cost anything and you don't even have to make an account to use it much like tinypic.
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Cantus
Posts: 237
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2019 6:08 pm

Post by Cantus »

Regardless of what image hosting service you use, it's best to properly size your images for posting on the ES forums.

The ideal maximum width for an image posted to the ES forums is 736 pixels.

That will take up the full width of a forum post without "stretching" the entire forum thread wider.


It's best to resize the image to be no wider than 736 pixels in your image editing program (Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) before hosting and posting. I recommend a scaled resize where your image editing program will also adjust the height accordingly to maintain the same aspect ratio (so that everything doesn't look stretched or distorted).

But an alternative is to specify a width in the image tag when adding it to your forum post. You'd do that like this:

Code: Select all

<img src="PasteImageLinkHere" width="736">
Notice the addition of width="736"

Just adding the width attribute should resize the height as well to maintain the same aspect ratio.
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