Images 101 in Tips and Tricks

One of the most common questions I see is "How do I put pictures in my entries?" Currently, there's no super-easy way to do this. It requires a little bit of knowledge about how images are stored and retrieved on web pages.

I don't host any images on Prosebox, other than the user avatars. This means you need to have your own hosting service for photos, like Photobucket or Flickr, and know how to find the URL to your image. That's the most important thing. If you don't have the correct URL to your picture, nothing else is going to work.

In my very first entry in Tips and Tricks, I showed a quick sample of posting a picture of a monkey. The URL of the monkey photo is:

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/007/cache/spider-monkey719600x450.jpg

It's just a web address that ends with a file name of a picture (generally .jpg, .png, or .gif). If it doesn't end with something like this, you probably don't have the right URL. Notice that I'm not actually hosting this on my own space; I'm linking directly to National Geographic. I'm hoping they will continue to be nice with their pictures and not block me from linking to it. There's no guarantee, though, so it's always a good idea to host pictures yourself, or they could vanish in the future.

You can test an image URL out by putting the URL in your browser's address bar. If you see only your picture on a white background, you're good to go. If you see something else, like your picture inside of Photobucket or Flickr, with buttons and toolbars and other junk, you DON'T have the right URL. There should be a way to get that URL from the hosting service; in fact, there's usually an option to grab the HTML you need, and just paste it right in your entry with no additional fuss.

The HTML you need (you can also do it in Markdown instead of HTML, see that first entry again with the monkey to see how) to actually display your picture in an entry is:

<img src="url" />

Where you replace url with your picture URL. (like the National Geographic URL listed above). And that's it! You should see your photo in your entry.