How to insert images in your SL Forums posts without using attachments

Posted on: July 5, 2006

Now also available on our new (and very much in-progress) Second Life Knowledge Base.

This question gets brought up frequently; it's only right it gets answered neatly too. Attachments on the SL Forums have been problematic lately for several reasons, including pictures in the Classifieds filling up too quickly and leading to technical errors. Rather than be prone to that flaky behavior, you can gain greater control and reliability by using an external image host, which is basically a website that'll store your snapshots for you! I personally use these four, all of which include free services; there are many more on the Internet, however. Any site which stores standard .GIF, .JPG, and .PNG graphics that you can link to directly should work.


Basically, it's a matter of signing up and reading the instructions on a site, and then getting the address of an image. For example, Photobucket is really easy to use because it shows the the URL right under the thumbnail of a picture:

Just copy and paste that into your forum post. You're almost done!

Next, surround it with [IMG] and [/IMG] tags.

For example:

[IMG]http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f329/Torley_Linden/early_stages.jpg[/IMG]


and when the rest of the post is the way you want it, go ahead and submit it, and you should see it show up!

Hello, I'm sharing a slice of my Second Life with you! See?

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f329/Torley_Linden/early_stages.jpg


If you have the Message Editor Interface set to "Enhanced Interface - Full WYSIWYG Editing", which you can do at the bottom of this page, there's also a little icon that looks like a yellow postcard with mountains and a stamp. Like so:

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f329/Torley_Linden/insertimage.png


If you click on it, it'll show you a dialog box that asks you to enter the URL of your image. After doing so, the [IMG] and [/IMG] tags will automatically be wrapped around.

Voila!

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