This guide covers the process of embedding pictures into your writings using simple - copy-paste of HTML code - method. Most of the popular picture hosting/sharing sites automatically provide this HTML code for each picture. We decided to use Photobucket site for our walk-through but you can easily follow the process with your favorite image hosting site. And if it doesn't provide ready to use HTML sharing codes, you can follow image insertion process described in our Basic Formatting Guide.
A photo can say a thousand words. And if you don’t like to type, that can be a pretty cool thing! Heck, even if you do like to type, sometimes a picture or two can really add to the content of your blog entry or forum post; and you can’t even make a project entry without having at least one image of it to show.
So how do those other HomeRefurbers get images in their blog, forum, and project entries? Glad you asked…
Sometimes the image can be loaded straight from your PC. This is the case when you are:
- adding images for a new project you’re posting
- adding images to your Workshop section.
In both of these situations, you will use a Browse button to search for the image on your hard drive and then use the Upload button to attach it to your project or workshop.
Sometimes, however, you will need to embed an image into a text area. These text areas look like this:
They can be found in:
- project stories
- blog entries
- comments
- forum topics
- and replies.
This is a pretty straight-forward process, as well. Basically, all you need to do is figure out a way to get your image saved somewhere in the wide, wide world of the Internet. For some people, that means saving them to their own personal website; for others, it means uploading the images to a website specifically designed for displaying and sharing pictures, like Shutterfly, Flickr, Zooomr, ImageShack, or Photobucket. Once the image is uploaded to the internet, it is just a matter of copying the HTML sharing code of that image and pasting it into your entry.
Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, it is. For this guide, we’re going to walk through the necessary steps for inserting an image onto your HomeRefurbers entry using one of the easier-to-use websites called Photobucket. If you would prefer more of a step-by-step form of instruction, check out the How To process for this same procedure.
Photobucket Overview
Photobucket is simply a photo-hosting website. There are two levels of Photobucket accounts; Free and Pro. The Free Account is the standard and it takes a total of about 30 seconds to set it up. It costs nothing to do so – it’s free, if that wasn’t obvious – and their on-screen assistance makes setting up your account pretty much effortless.
Photobucket Albums
When you first open your account, you will automatically be given a photo album. In order to better organize the photos you load onto your Photobucket account, you can create sub-albums. You can create as many sub-albums as you want or need! One great way to use this feature is to create a sub-album for all of your different projects to help keep them organized.
An Overview Of Uploading Pictures To Photobucket
After you’ve set up your account and created whatever sub-albums you want, you have to upload images into those albums – that is, after all, the purpose of this guide! The default Upload Images & Videos setting allows you to upload one image at a time. If you want to upload more than one image at a time, click the Add More Images hyperlink. You can learn more about uploading in the Photobucket's uploading tutorial.
Embedding Images Into A HomeRefurbers Post
Once you’ve uploaded your images into your Photobucket account, you can begin adding embedded images into your LumberJock posts! After we walk through an example of the process, step-by-step, you’ll be adding images to your posts in no time.
Let’s start by creating a new blog entry. In honor of Charles and Henry, this example will involve the creation of my first Thorsen Challenge blog. I have some ideas in mind, and I’d like to play around with them, maybe even give a little indication of what I’m thinking about doing. Or maybe it is just a red herring! In any case, here is my blog entry in its unmodified form:
I haven’t said much about the Thorsen Challenge – I’m a man of many words, but I rarely speak them without giving the subject some thought and contemplation. In the case of the Thorsen Challenge, I gave it a lot of both! I’m mostly a small-project woodworker, so part of the challenge for me is to come up with an interpretation that fits within the realm of my methodology and capabilities. But the other part of the challenge is to come up with something that will push my woodworking skills to a higher level! From a design point of view, I feel the need to honor the Greene and Greene tradition of mahogany and ebony. Ok, I actually don’t have any ebony in my shop, but I do have a nice amount of blackwood – I think that will be an acceptable substitute, don’t you? In any case, that’s what I’m using. But I do have the mahogany! While most of it is of the non-figured variety, I’ve been squirreling away bits and pieces here and there that have some exceptional figuring in them. Beautiful, isn’t it? I was wondering if there’s some way I can work a bit of this figured mahogany into the project. The first step will be to take a better evaluation of what I have on hand and see which pieces might be useful. After that, I’ll just have to play around with the design and see if it has a place in my project. That’s enough for now, I think… More to come later, I’m sure!
And now here is the blog entry after I’ve gone through and added my basic formatting:
I haven’t said much about the Thorsen Challenge – I’m a man of many words, _but I rarely speak them without giving the subject some thought and contemplation._ In the case of the Thorsen Challenge, I gave it a lot of both!
I’m mostly a *small-project* woodworker, so part of the challenge for me is to come up with an interpretation that fits _within the realm of my methodology and capabilities._ But the other part of the challenge is to come up with something that will push my woodworking skills to a _higher level!_
From a design point of view, I feel the need to honor the Greene and Greene tradition of mahogany and ebony. Ok, I actually don’t have any ebony in my shop, but I do have a nice amount of blackwood – I think that will be an acceptable substitute, don’t you? In any case, that’s what I’m using.
But I do have the mahogany! While most of it is of the non-figured variety, I’ve been squirreling away bits and pieces here and there that have some exceptional figuring in them.
<Insert Image Here>
Beautiful, isn’t it?
I was wondering if there’s some way I can work a bit of this figured mahogany into the project. The first step will be to take a better evaluation of what I have on hand and see which pieces might be useful. After that, I’ll just have to play around with the design and see if it has a place in my project. That’s enough for now, I think… More to come later, I’m sure!
Not bad – but if you can’t tell, it’s missing an image. I did enter a note to myself, <Insert Image Here>, but it is just a note – it doesn’t really do anything, and I’ll remove it when I add the image. So now I need to go in and add the image where I indicated I would.
To do that, I open up a new web browser, navigate to www.Photobucket.com and log in to my account. After signing in, it will display the images I’ve already uploaded to my account from my PC. The image I’m looking for appears as so:
Now, I need to copy the HTML Tag so I can add it to my blog. To do this, I just need to click once in the box next to the HTML Tag field, like so:
As you can see, a small yellow text box will pop up, indicating that I’ve copied the HTML Tag to my clipboard (Note that in some browsers the copy function does not occur automatically, so after you highlight the text in the HTML Tag box, you can copy it to your clipboard with the <Ctrl> C function.). I can now use the Paste function to insert the copied tag into my blog, overwriting the <Insert Image Here> note. The final formatted blog entry will look like this:
I haven’t said much about the Thorsen Challenge – I’m a man of many words, _but I rarely speak them without giving the subject some thought and contemplation._ In the case of the Thorsen Challenge, I gave it a lot of both!
I’m mostly a *small-project* woodworker, so part of the challenge for me is to come up with an interpretation that fits _within the realm of my methodology and capabilities._ But the other part of the challenge is to come up with something that will push my woodworking skills to a _higher level!_
From a design point of view, I feel the need to honor the Greene and Greene tradition of mahogany and ebony. Ok, I actually don’t have any ebony in my shop, but I do have a nice amount of blackwood – I think that will be an acceptable substitute, don’t you? In any case, that’s what I’m using.
But I do have the mahogany! While most of it is of the non-figured variety, I’ve been squirreling away bits and pieces here and there that have some exceptional figuring in them.
<a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t125/esincox/CurlyMahogany01.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket"></a>
Beautiful, isn’t it?
I was wondering if there’s some way I can work a bit of this figured mahogany into the project. The first step will be to take a better evaluation of what I have on hand and see which pieces might be useful. After that, I’ll just have to play around with the design and see if it has a place in my project. That’s enough for now, I think… More to come later, I’m sure!
It doesn’t look very pretty at this point, but let’s see how the end result turns out. We can find out before we save by checking with the 
button. Or, if you’re confident of your abilities, just go ahead and save it! The results of my efforts look like this:
I haven’t said much about the Thorsen Challenge – I’m a man of many words, but I rarely speak them without giving the subject some thought and contemplation. In the case of the Thorsen Challenge, I gave it a lot of both!
I’m mostly a small-project woodworker, so part of the challenge for me is to come up with an interpretation that fits within the realm of my methodology and capabilities. But the other part of the challenge is to come up with something that will push my woodworking skills to a higher level!
From a design point of view, I feel the need to honor the Greene and Greene tradition of mahogany and ebony. Ok, I actually don’t have any ebony in my shop, but I do have a nice amount of blackwood – I think that will be an acceptable substitute, don’t you? In any case, that’s what I’m using.
But I do have the mahogany! While most of it is of the non-figured variety, I’ve been squirreling away bits and pieces here and there that have some exceptional figuring in them.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
I was wondering if there’s some way I can work a bit of this figured mahogany into the project. The first step will be to take a better evaluation of what I have on hand and see which pieces might be useful. After that, I’ll just have to play around with the design and see if it has a place in my project. That’s enough for now, I think… More to come later, I’m sure!
Note: The picture appears cropped on the right side because the content area is narrower than 640 pixels (picture width). In the near future, the content area width will be increased to accommodate images up to 640 pixels wide.
So there we have it. That wasn’t terribly difficult then, was it? You now have all the knowledge you need to upload images to the Internet and insert them into your comments and blogs.
Other Photo-Hosting Sites
As previously mentioned, there are quite a few other photo-hosting websites out there, including Flickr, Zooomr, Shutterfly and ImageShack. If you don’t find Photobucket to your liking, then check out some of the others and see if one of them suits you better! No matter which site you decide to go with, the process is pretty much the same and you should be able to embed images into your LumberJock posts in no time!
