Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 3, 0 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Lucy,

"In three years, perhaps I will learn how to post pictures."

Hopefully it won't take that long, although it may take a while to read this message. Dave wants the pictures to be no wider than 1000 pixels, and they will be downsized by Dave's forum software if you exceed that. It helps to have a decent bitmap editor to resize your pictures with minimal degradation in image quality. I use Photoshop, but Adobe's Photoshop Elements costs much less and has a lot of the capability of Photoshop.

To be on the "safe" side, I down-sample my pictures to 992 pixels wide for display here on Dave's Garden. That is just to guarantee to me that Dave's software does not mess with my images. Presumably 1000-pixels would be OK, but you never know when a software bug will occur at a logical boundary. I am willing to give up 8 pixels just to be on the "safe" side of the boundary.

I use only JPEG images with .JPG file extensions, but Dave's Garden may accept other image types. I don't know the details of that. Most digital cameras can save JPEG images and JPEG compression works fairly well, so I haven't experimented with PNG, TIF, GIF, etc.

When you wish to attach a picture to a message, notice the Image: - Browse feature below the message entry box. Click on Browse and a File Upload pane will open, in which you can browse to where your picture is. It is a very good idea to know in advance where in your computer the image is located, and its exact filename. When you find your intended image filename in the Browse window, you can click on the file (I usually change my File View option to Thumbnails in order to confirm that I have picked the intended picture) and click Open to select it for Dave. I have selected a recent scabiosa-influenced zinnia picture as I went through this process myself.

The file path will now appear in the Image: field. Before you click on the Preview button, you can change the image selection by re-clicking on the "Browse..." button, but once you click the Preview button to preview your message, Dave's Garden uploads your image, the "Browse..." button goes away, and you can no longer change your mind about the picture. (You might be able to contact Dave directly and have him fix an accidentally uploaded "wrong" image.)

There will be brief delay in displaying your preview while the upload process completes. Your preview will show a thumbnail of your image, but you can't click on it yet to see the full sized image yet, and Dave's advises you of that with This is a thumbnail image - the readers will be able to see an enlarged version once it is posted.

If the thumbnail is clearly of the wrong image, you can abort the message transaction by not clicking the "Send" button and simply close your browser window. The image and your message will both go into the "bit bucket" at Dave's.

Otherwise, you can still edit your message in the "Your message:" box, and re-preview your message with the "Preview" button, but you can't change the image. When you are satisfied with your message and the image in the thumbnail, you can click the "Send" button to send the message-picture combination to the forum, where you and everyone else can view it.

Dave's Garden lets you edit your messages after they appear in the forum, but I don't think you can edit what image is attached to them. That's a rather long explanation of how to post a picture here, but believe me, it takes longer to say it than to do it.

ZM