One of the most frequently asked questions here at Nikongear is this: How do I post my photos on the forum?

There are two methods of making your photos appear in posts on the forum.

1. Adding them as an attachment to your post

This method is the easiest and is only available to Subscribers (all levels) and members with a +100 post count. Just below the big white box where you would type your message, you’ll see a plus sign with the words “Additional Options” right next to it. The red arrow in figure 1 shows the location of this icon.

Figure 1 - click to enlarge

Clicking this icon reveals the box you can use to upload a file from your computer directly into the message.

You can attach up to 5 images to any post, but each individual image must not be bigger than 300kb and the total file sizes of all your attachments can’t be more than 1MB. Once uploaded these images are physically stored on the Nikongear server. Take note that only Subscribers and +100 post members will be able to see them.

2. Linking to images hosted elsewhere

This is the most common method of posting images on any number of web based forums, including Nikongear. By using this method whenever a thread containing linked images is opened on Nikongear, a simultaneous request is passed to the server that hosts your images, asking it to supply the required files in real time.

It’s important to note that if the server hosting your images is not set up to allow hot linking from outside servers, your image will not be displayed in your forum post on Nikongear.  Also, should your server be unavailable for any reason the same thing will happen.

OK, so now you know what hot linking is, how do you actually do it?

Very simple. Just above the big white box where you type your message you’ll see a row of animated smilies and just above that you’ll see a row of icons too (see figure 2 below). The second icon from the left looks like a picture with a yellow frame around it. When you click this icon it inserts a set of what we call bbcode tags into the message body. The second red arrow in figure 2 shows what they look like.

Figure 2 - click to enlarge

All you need to do once you have those tags showing is type in the full URL to wherever your image is being hosted. For instance, [img]http://www.thisismydomain.com/thisismypicture.jpg[/img]. You can link to as many images in your post as you’d like, using a seperate set of tags for each one, however it’s courteous to keep this number to around 10 or less as not everyone has high speed internet connections.

Sometimes you might be able to see the images appearing in your Nikongear post, but others can’t. This is most likely because you have a session cookie stored on your browser that allows you to see those images. If you’re unsure about whether others can see the images or not, try looking at your post from a different computer to see what’s going on. If you can’t see the images there, then the chances of others seeing them are pretty slim.

More useful information for hotlinking

Nikongear members can link to images stored in their personal Nikongear galleries using the same hot linking method. We’ve made it pretty easy by adding a button called “Gallery Image” (seen next to the “Preview” button in both figures 1 & 2). When you click this a box opens where you can navigate to your own Nikongear gallery folder and insert the image using any of the methods listed there. This method automatically types the required tags for you, so you don’t have to click on the picture frame icon described in method 2.

Another way of doing this from your Nikongear gallery is to simply copy the bbcode from the page displaying your picture on the gallery and put this into your post (as is). See figure 3 below.

Figure 3 - click to enlarge

If you’re unsure of the URL of your images, regardless of where they are hosted, the best thing to do is to navigate to them in your browser. Get the picture up on the screen and then right-click on it. Firefox users will see an option in the pop-up menu called “Copy Image Location”. Just select that and paste it between the [img][/img] bbcode tags and you should be good to go. If you’re using that unspeakable Microsoft browser product there’s a good chance that hackers will have access to all your online banking details if you right click anywhere on the page. Probably best to just forget about Nikongear altogether then.

Hopefully now that we’ve shown you how to put your images into your posts we’ll be seeing a lot more of them being posted to the forum. If you’re still not clear on how to do this there’s this bridge in NYC with further instructions written on the underside of it. We can supply GPS co-ordinates if you’d like.