Saturday, January 22, 2005

breaking news: Photobucket RULES

Photobucket officially kicks the ass of Flickr.

I'm a cyber-retard, plus I'm impatient, so I have to go with software that works intuitively. Photobucket's system took me less than five minutes to learn. Hard to beat. You upload your picture (they accept a variety of formats), and SHAZAM-- they even create the "img src" tag for you. I no longer have to add pic dimension specs, ALT text, or anything-- unless I want to.

Here, once again:



That's what I was looking for: the ability to post my pics the way I designed them to look.

By the way, some advice to those of you who like posting huge pictures: be sure to scale them down to a width narrower than that of your main text column. For me, that means staying under 601 pixels in width. For those of you with narrower main text columns... go slim. It's obnoxious when you oblige me to scroll sideways.

Photobucket comes as a relief, because I'm starting to run low on FTP space. The only thing that worries me is that I'm now at the mercy of their Terms of Service, a nightmarish throwback to AOL. I'm hoping, however, that Photobucket isn't patrolled the way AOL message boards are, so we'll be violating TOS with some regularity here. I hope.

For those of you looking to slap pics on your blog for the first time, here's the 5-minute procedure:

1. Visit www.photobucket.com. Click the "Sign Up" link at the top.

2. Register for the FREE account. Take note of what features will be available for you. Select the PREMIUM account instead, if you so desire.

3. Go through the email confirmation procedure. Click the account activation link in your email. You'll get a screen that says YOUR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN ACTIVATED! Click that link as well.

4. You're in, baby. She's soft, warm, hot, pink, and wet, isn't she. Now log in. That should have taken, all in all, no more than 3 minutes.

5. You're at the ADD PICTURES window. Tweak the "Blog Options" to your preferences. If you're using Blogger, then for God's sakes don't hit Live Journal. Follow the instructions. When done, go back to the ADD PICTURES window by clicking on the "Album: YOURNAME" link on the left side of your screen.

5. Try uploading a picture. It's easy. On the ADD PICTURES window, hit BROWSE to select a file to add. Add the pic. Click "Submit" to put the pic in Photobucket.

6. Now you see the miracle. Scroll down. A thumbnail image of your pic is visible. Below that, you'll see three fields: (1) Url, (2) Tag, and (3) Img. FOR YOUR BLOGGING PURPOSES, just concern yourself with (2), the TAG.

7. Do a test post into your blog. Simply copy that tag, then paste it into your Blogger edit window (add "center" HTML tags to center the pic if you so desire*). Add whatever text you want before & after the pic. Post that thang as you would a normal blog post.

And that's IT! The procedure looks complicated when written out, but I simply followed Photobucket's instructions and did all this within a very short time. I can't imagine it taking you longer than 10 minutes, tops, to be posting images to your blog from Photobucket. After initial setup, future posting should be a breeze: log in, upload pic, copy tag, paste into blog entry, and POST.

[Special thanks to Nomad and Shawn for suggesting this service.]






*Almost everything I learned about HTML tags comes from this site. Visit it. Take the time to learn some basic HTML if you don't know it already.


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