Posting pictures is easy. Just copy the URL of the picture and paste it into a message. That's the simplest way.

The URL, or "uniform resource locator" is a fancy term computer scientists made up that means "web address". It's easier to type "URL" than "web address" otherwise I think the term might have died out.

A URL can be an address of a page of text or a picture or something else. The way to get the url of a picture is to right click on it. What happens next depends on what browser you you use. I use Opera and when I right click one of the menu options I'm presented with is "Copy Image Address" which is what I want. In IE 6, you have to right click on the image, select "properties" then copy the URL that shows up. The UTL will start with "http://..." and will end with "...jpg" if it's a JPG picture which most are.

Now that you've highlighted this with your cusor and selected copy you can test to see if you really have it by pasting it into the address line of a web browser. If the picture comes up, then you've done it right. Now just go ahead and paste that url into a forum message and people will be able to get that picture.

Of course this only works with pictures that are on servers on the network. A picture on your computer isn't something anybody else can see. You need to keep an eye out for URLs that start "file:///" because they're on your computer not on a server and only you can see them. Stick them on Flickr or something...

Here's an example of a URL of an image:

This is the minimum you need to do for people to be able to see your pictures.

Most web message boards allow the picture to come up so you don't have to copy and paste a link to a picture. Just put the word "IMG" in square brackets in front of it and again at the end with with a forward slash which means "quit". But leave out the quotes. It should look like this:

This way the picture should appear instead of the link:

Richard Sexton, Mar 2008