No doubt if you are already displaying your own image in your sig then you will have a good idea what this question is about. If you don't and you'd really love to know how to get your own images displayed here is a very basic and quick walk through "What is Image Hosting?"
What is an Image Host?Image Hosts are websites that are dedicated to storing and providing links to images that have been uploaded by the user. By using one of these websites you develop an online "album" of your images and can go through and view them if you are a registered member.
Why do you need one?Here on Ober.net we use IMG tags to make our images display. The tags look like this: [ IMG] [ /IMG] (but without the spaces). The first one tells your web browser where the image information is starting and the second one tells your browser that it is ending by including an end symbol or a backslash. An example of how they are used is here:
[ IMG ]The url of the image goes here.[ /IMG ]
This is important because Artistsmerge is about graphics and images and offers you the chance to upload and share things you have been working on and want to show or would like some feedback on. This is where the image hosting comes in. To use the IMG tags the image has to be uploaded to the net first so that it can be assigned a URL. And a place you can do that is an image host.
Where can i upload my images?There are a HUGE amount of possibilities for this. Go to
Google and type in "image hosting" and you will see what I mean.
Two of the most popular Image Hosts are
Photobucket and
ImageShack.
Photobucket is one of these favorites as it creates an online album, offers you the ability to edit your images after you have uploaded them and also offers the links coded for various uses. If you decide to go with Photobucket you will need to create an account first. The benefit of this means that once you set your album to private no one else can get into it and your images won't be found when people do searches. So if you are worried about privacy or copyright this is probably a good option.
Here is a screenshot of a photobucket account. This is what it looks like when you are logged in. You get a thumbnail view of each photo in that album and the uploader is on every page.
Image Shack works some what differently to Photobucket. First off you don't need to sign up for an account if you really don't want to. You can just upload the image and use the url straight away. The problem is that if you decide later that you need that image again and don't have the url you will have one heck of a time trying to find it.
If you sign up as a member you'll see its a bit like a Myspace only its mostly dedicated to hosting files. A definite pro about using Image Shack is that it offers you the ability to post a clickable thumbnail that links to the full sized image which Photobucket doesn't do. All the available coding is very clearly laid out and its easy to use once you get the hang of it. It can also edit and animate some images and can be set to private in the preferences.
This is a screenshot if you are not logged into Image Shack. Its fairly simple and easy to use.
This is a screenshot of when you are logged in. As i mentioned it is similar to myspace. Unfortunately you have to
scroll down all the way to get to the uploader.So after this quick run through if you still aren't sure which one you want to use i suggest picking one and testing it out. You won't know if you'll like it until you try it!