9-18-2021

Posting photos on the Spyderco Forum

This is crude and obnoxious, but sometimes you want to pay the price and post a photo.

There are two ways that I have found. One is to use the attachment feature, which has never given me the results I want. The other is to put the photo on some photo server and link to it.

The preview button

There are enough unpredictable aspects of this photo inclusion business that you need to know first and up front about the "Preview" button. This appears alongside of Submit in the Full editor dialog. It is highly recommended that you use it to ensure that your efforts appear as you wish before dumping them on the forum.

The attachment feature

The "reply" dialog that you use to generate a post has a button at the bottom that is labeled "Full Editor and Preview". Click this.

There is a blue area at the bottom of the dialog this brings up. It has two tabs, one is labeled "Attachments". You click this and a button appears that says "Add file". You click this and your browser should open a gizmo that lets you rummage around on your local machine, find the file you want to attach and then "Open" it to attach the file. You will get a complaint if the file is too large. I could experiment by trial and error to find out, but I don't have the energy. A 640 pixel wide file (256K) works. A 1024 pixel wide file (563K) works. No telling if the size limit is based on pixels or size in bytes.

I just experimented with a 1024 pixel wide file. The forum inserts a tiny thumbnail (400 pixels wide) no matter what the size of your image. If you click on the thumbnail, you get a page that shows the full size image. It seems that nobody on the forum uses this feature.

Using an external photo server

I see that another fellow uses "imgur". The following instructions recommend using postimage.cc, also known as postimage.org I used postimage and found that I need to download one photo at a time to postimage, otherwise it radically shrank my photos when I tried to download a batch. Postimage will show you a "direct link" which you should copy and paste into the Spyderco Forum. You want to end up with that URL wrapped in [IMG] ... [\IMG] markup. Note that there is a button at the top of the window that looks like a mountain (?) which will inject an empty pair of IMG tags for you.

I resize my photos (in lightroom) to 640 pixels wide before downloading them to postimage, but I see people saying that you don't need to resize your photos first. I wonder what happens if you resize to 1024 pixels and download to postimage? Well, in short, it works even better!

I tried a 1024 pixel wide image and it made it to the forum 1024 pixels wide by way of "postimages". This actually seems the perfect width, it neatly fills the width the forum allocates for text.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Knife Info / tom@mmto.org