Posting photos on DW

[shadowkat]

Regarding the photo uploading question?

Here's DW's response:

Unfortunately, this is behavior that Facebook and Instagram do; it is not something fixable on Dreamwidth's end.

When you link to an image that was uploaded on a site like Facebook using Copy Image Location, what you're doing is hotlinking that image -- whenever someone views that image on your Dreamwidth, Facebook's server is what receives the image request and sends the image data over the internet. What this means to sites like Facebook is that someone is using their resources (bandwidth, request handling capabilities) but is not actually bringing any traffic to that site (so no ad revenue). It's a sort of freeloading for images, and many sites do not like this behavior and so will do things to discourage it. In Facebook's case, they frequently change the URLs of images so URLs that used to work will break after some period of time. (This also has safety/privacy benefits.) Other sites make it very difficult to right-click/access URLs.

Some options:

Imgur: This website allows very quick, easy upload of images and allows you to copy the image URL. It's one of the few sites that allows hotlinking for free. I highly recommend this option as it's very beginner-friendly and, unless you expressly post your images to the general public, people will not come across your images unless you give them a link.

Dreamwidth: I too struggle with the Dreamwidth interface for images, but you're not stuck with images that are too big or too small. There are two ways to adjust the size of images:

Option #1: From the image upload page: When you upload an image to Dreamwidth, there is code for you to copy, but this code makes the image show up too small, so is not helpful. Copy the first URL you see in the code. The first part of the code should look like Take the URL portion of that: https://shadowkat.dreamwidth.org/file/####.jpg If you see dimensions in the URL like "100x100", then this is not the full size; try looking at another part of the code.

Once you have the URL, go to your entry. If you're in Rich Text mode, click the Insert/Edit Image icon and paste the URL. You can set features like width/height and alignment here too. If you're in HTML mode, click Insert Image and paste the URL, or just directly type: and paste the URL between the empty quotation marks. Then, within the angle brackets, add a width attribute like this:


This will set the width of the image to be 500 pixels. Adjust the width value higher or lower to your liking.

If you would like to center the image, you can easily do this by adding tags around the image like this:


More advanced positioning is possible, although you may need to consult some references on HTML and CSS to accomplish them.

Option #2: Go to your Your Images page to see all the images you've uploaded. Getting there is a bit of a hassle -- go to the main Dreamwidth page, then Organize > Manage Images, then click "View all your images" (or go to this URL: https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/list). For each image, you have the option to embed the full image (which may be too big) or to embed a smaller thumbnail version of the image. Here, on the right side, you can choose the max size of a dimension of the image to display, so you can choose something larger than the default code you get when you uploaded the image. The default size, 100, is usually way too small. By choosing a different size, you can copy code to resize the image.


I may try Imgur.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Thanks for sharing their response, I find it unsurprising it was on FB's end. They have also deliberately broken RSS feeds for their platforms -- anything to keep you on FB itself.