YotaTech: Tech, Mods, SUV, 4WD, 4x4, Toyota, Toyota 4Runner, Surf, HiLux, Tundra, Land Cruiser, Tacoma, and Mini Truck Forums

How To Post Avatars & Pictures

Avatars:
From time to time questions often pop up on how to resize avatars, or how to post pictures on the board.
Most of this info can be found in the main FAQ on the site.

Go to your Control Panel and click on Edit Avatar from the menu.
From there at the very bottom of the page is a link to click on to change your avatar.
You can use some of the ones on file here, or upload your own.
The avatars do not need to be hosted on the Internet, they can come off of your hard drive, as the YotaTech server will host the avatar for you.

Right now the avatar size is set at 140x140 pixels, and 10,240 kb in file size.
If you need a picture editor to resize your pictures for avatars, Tucows is a good place to start to pick up free software, or software you can try with a free trial period before you have pay to register it.
Also if you are running WIndows XP as your operating system, they have some cool software called PowerToys.
One of them is an image resizer which will resize any picture you have to a preset setting, or one you input.
Get the files from here.

Pictures:
To post a picture in your post, you need to click on the IMG command that you will see when you are composing your post.
What it does is input the command:
[img]URL to picture[/img]
And you paste or type in the pathway to the URL of your image.

If you choose to have your picture show up in the post, please keep them sized at 800x600 or less, preferably 640x480.
Any bigger than 800x600, and everyone has to scroll their screen back and forth to view the image, unless you are lucky enough to have a 21" monitor or bigger.
If we find huge pictures in a post, we will take out the img command and make your picture a clickable link.
If you want to post an image bigger than 800x600, just paste the URL by itself into your post, and it will become a clickable link, and that way it will open up in it's own window for us to view it.

To resize your pics, please see the URL above to the Windows PowerToys Image Resizer for XP.

Some may also see often on the forum that members have put in a thumbnail picture that points to either a bigger picture, or to a link on the Internet.
The code for that is:
[URL=real_URL_goes_here.jpg][IMG]thumbnail_URL_goes_here.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Hosting Pictures:
If you need webspace for your pictures to post, most ISP's often give you free webspace to host your files.
There are a lot of free picture album hosts out there too, but a lot will not let you directly link a picture outside of their domain to a forum.
This is done by them so you have to visit their site and see their advertisements so they can make up for lost revenue for the free service they offer to you.

If you need a picture host, try Montypics.
They are free (donations gladly accepted to keep him free) and they will show up here.

Photobucket is also a great picture host, and lets you directly input your pictures into a post for all to see.

Of the two above, Photobucket is more reliable.

Also note that you can add a picture as an attachment, but I really don't recommend it.
Why?
1. Pictures are limited to 50 kb each as to not tax our server space, and your pictures will be small and quite possibly grainy.
2. The server has to be cleaned up once in awhile to purge out files, and it's quite possible that your attachment that is here today won't be here tomorrow.
3. With all the free pictures hosts on the Internet today, there really is no excuse to not have your own personal webspace for your pictures.
4. YotaTech will not be held responsible for lost pictures if you choose to upload them to our server as attachments.

UPDATE:
Saw a post on the forum, and a member found from reading elsewhere on how to make a Webshot's picture show up in your post.
I have not tried it with Geocities, but it does work for sure with Webshot's.
What you need to do is put an URL in front of the URL to your Webshot's picture.
Make sure you are right clicking your Webshot's picture and getting the true URL of it by the properties box that pops up, and not the URL of the page the picture is on.
Here is the URL you use:
http://invis.free.anonymizer.com/

UPDATE 2:
Yet another member found a site that will let you directly link pictures to the forum.
The link for the site to use for hosting your pictures is here.

YotaTech, we put the T in Tech