How to attach pictures to your posts

Given that there has been a lot of recent posts complaining about not being able to attach pics properly to posts, I thought I'd sit down and write a little guide. This guide will be split into two parts. The first part (this post) will cover uploading your images to APS. The second part will cover uploading your images to a remote picture hosting site and sharing the links here.


N.B. Currently there are several known issues that affect users of Internet Explorer 10 when posting to forums that use the vBulletin Software, such as APS. Therefore, for the purpose of this guide, I will be using Firefox instead.

If you attempt to upload a picture and the hourglass (blue circle) just sits there doing nothing, the only current fix is to use a different browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

UPDATE December 2013: Internet Explorer 11 appears to have addressed the issues experienced in IE10 and therefore posting pictures as per this guide will now work as it should.

Important: There appears to have been a recent change taken place in the APS back-end that has placed a size limit on uploaded pictures to a resolution of 1024x768. Any pictures with a higher resolution will not currently successfully upload. So please ensure your pictures meet this size limit before continuing with this guide. This issue also affects the way attachments are displayed. There is no longer a thumbnail displayed, but just the attachment filename. N.B. THIS ISSUE HAS NOW BEEN FIXED


iPhone Users: Using the Safari browser, this guide works basically the same. The only difference being that the File Upload Manager opens in a new tab. Therefore, just upload your pic as per the instructions in this guide, then once it is done navigate back to the original tab to submit your post.


So, let's begin......


Firstly, you want to choose the Advanced editor. To do this, click the "Go Advanced" button down in the bottom right corner.





Next, we need to click the Attachments icon, that looks like a paperclip.





This will bring up the File Upload Manager. We now want to click on "Add Files".





Now click on "Browse" to choose your picture, then click "Upload".





Once the upload has completed, you will be able to see it in the Attachments area. The icon will look like a "?", but this is fine. Click "Done" to close this window.





Now you can type your message. You will also notice that your picture is listed under the Attachments section. Once you have finished typing your message, click on "Preview Post".





Now you can see the preview of your post. If you are not happy with it, make the relevant changes. Once you are happy with the result, click "Submit Reply".





Now here is the completed post. All done.

Welcome to Part Two of the guide. This is where we will learn how to upload images to a remote image host and share the links here.

This is actually my preferred method of sharing images. One of the reasons for this is that you may then centrally manage all of your images, and share with as many sites/forums as you wish.

Now, there are many image host sites available. A few of which are PhotoBucket, Tinypic, Imageshack, Flickr, etc. For the purpose of this guide, I will use imgur.com. This is a free hosting site and the beauty of this is that you don't even need to have an account. You can just upload your images right away. If however, you are planning on uploading lots of images, I recommend you create an account so that they are all stored in the one place and are easily accessible.

So let's get started.

In your browser, go to imgur.com.

Then click on "Computer". This will bring up an explorer window for you to browse for your picture to upload.





Now click on "Start Upload".





Once the upload has completed, you will see a number of links. For the purpose of sharing your images here, the link we want is the BBCode. Copy that link to the clipboard.





Now all you need to do is paste that link into your message body. Add whatever text you want to your message, then use the "Preview Post" function just to check that everything looks OK.






Done.

We are aware and working on a current issue around image attachments. Post 2 of this guide will work in the interim until the issue is shorted. Apologies for the hassle.
Stu