Guide: Posting Screenshots - WaMMO Servers

Diab · #1 (**permalink**) 10-02-2008, 07:26 PM

Taking Screenshots, Cropping Images, and Posting
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A guide to taking screenshots, hosting them, posting them, and everything in between.
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This is a guide that I made originally for a fansite forum for an MMO called Guild Wars. However as most of the things detailed in this guide are pretty generic, it could be used for any game. I just took my old guild, and updated a few sections of it for WoW instead of GW.

There's been a few people not knowing how to post images on the forums. These images may be screenshots, or your own artwork, or any image that you have on your computer. With this guide, I will try to explain how to take images stored on your hard drive, and host them online so that you can post them onto a forum or website.

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Contents:

I. Taking Screenshots in World of Warcraft
II. Cropping and Lowering the File Sizes of Images
III. Online Image-Hosting Websites and their Usage
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I. Taking Screenshots
World of Warcraft

Screenshots are taken with the Print Screen key on the keyboard. It's usually located right above the set of keys above the arrow keys.

You can take screenshots without the HUD showing (HUD means your actionbars, hp/mana bars, minimap, etc.), by pressing Alt + Z. The same combination of keys will bring it back.

The screenshot will be saved as a JPG file in your World of Warcraft directory, in the Screenshots folder.

Other applications

The same Print Screen key is also used to take a screenshot just about anywhere else. Some games may have their own screenshot function that you can assign to a keyboard key. But it's very rare that the Print Screen key cannot be used.

You can use it in any kinds of programs. You can take a screenshot of your desktop, or a screenshot of someone's post on the forums, for example. Once you press the Print Screen key, the image of the screen, not including the mouse cursor, gets copied into the computer's memory. You can then paste this image into an image-editing program like MS Paint, and save it as a file. Directions for this are in a later section.

II. Cropping and Lowering the File Sizes of Images
Cropping images

Cropping is defined as using an image-editing program to cut out parts of a large image. Cropping is very useful when, for example, you take a screenshot in GuildWars and want to cut out a picture of your weapon stats.

We're going to go over how this is done with a simple program called MS Paint. It comes with every version of Windows, as far as I know.
(Note: I'm using WindowsXP here. Other versions may or may not require different directions.)
1. Open the image file inside MS Paint. This can sometimes be done by right-clicking on the file and selecting 'Edit'. Or, you can right-click on the file, go to 'Open With...', and select 'Paint'. Another way is to simply open up the program by going to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Paint. After that, just go to 'File' and then 'Open...', and browse to and open your image.

2. Once you have the image open inside Paint, click on the Select tool (

). Move the mouse to one corner of the image you want to cut out, hold the mouse button, and drag to the opposite corner, drawing a selection box around it.

3. Press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy that selected image into the computer's memory. Alternatively, you can go to 'Edit' and click on 'Copy'.

4. Press Ctrl+N (or go to 'File' and then 'New') to create a new Paint document. When it asks you whether or not you want to save the current image, say No.

5. Move your mouse to the bottom-right corner of the empty document, and make sure that the mouse cursor changes to the resize pointer (diagonal dual-arrow line). Click and drag that up and left, leaving yourself with the smallest document you can make. This step prevents white edges around your image crops. When you paste the image in, in the next step, it will automatically enlarge the document to fit the image's size (it might ask you if you want it to do this; say Yes to this).

6. Paste the image from the computer's memory into this new document by pressing Ctrl+V, or going to 'Edit' and then 'Paste'.

7. Once you have the newly-cropped image as your whole new document, you can save this image by going to 'File' and then 'Save As...'. Select a directory to put the file in, type in a name, select the image format to use ('Save As Type:' box; discussed earlier), and hit the 'Save' button.

You now have your cropped image.

Lowering file size

The ideal file size for an image posted on a public website or forum should be no more than 100 kilobytes (KB). Not everyone has a high-speed connection, so this is to make sure that everyone can load the image quickly. If you simply must post an image that's much greater, or even a few megabytes (MB) in size (showing off your game graphics, for example), try not to post it in the forum as an image, but rather as a link. This is so that the people with a slow connection can choose whether to try to load and view the image or not, and still get to read the thread.

Re-saving your JPG using MS Paint, is one of the easiest ways to decrease file size. Just open your image in MS Paint, go to 'File', and then 'Save As...'. Then, just change the "Save As Type:" box to say one of JPEG, PNG, or GIF. Just click 'Save', and now you have the same image, saved in a compressed-file format, usually with a much lower file size.

III. Online Image-Hosting Websites and their Usage

Ok, so you now have your image that you want to post up on a website or a forum. You can't just give the directory on your hard drive where the image resides, because people and website cannot see into your computer.

Therefore, you must somehow put that image online. You can upload them to a website of your own if you have one, or you can use a free image-hosting website. Since most people do not own a website of their own, the latter option is the most popular.

There are a number of different websites that you can use, which you can find by using a search engine: image hosting - Google Search

Two of the most popular, and the two listed on the very top in the above search results, are ImageShack and Photobucket.

ImageShack
ImageShack® - Image Hosting
This one does not require you to make an account. You can just upload images, up to 1.5 megabytes in size each. The allowed image formats are: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, bmp, tif, tiff, and swf.

To host an image on ImageShack:
Go to ImageShack® - Image Hosting. Click the 'Browse...' button and navigate to your image that's stored on your computer. Click 'Open' once you have found the image, and then click the 'host it!' button on the webpage. Once you have done that, it uploads the image onto the ImageShack servers, and brings you to a page with 8 different URLs.

There are three thumbnail URLs at the top. The first is in HTML, for use with coding websites. The next two are for forums. There are two since some forums use one style and some use the other. The WaMMO forums use the "Thumbnail for forums (1)" URL style, with [IMG]&[/IMG] tags surrounding the direct URL to the image. You can just copy and paste that here in this forum, and it will display your image in a thumbnail. Once people click your thumbnail, they will be taken to the full-size image on the ImageShack website.

Next, further down, you have "Hotlinks". These are the way to post your full-size image into a post on a forum, without the thumbnail link. "Hotlink for forums (1)" is the one you would use for these forums. There is also a hotlink for websites in HTML code, there as well.

The next URL is labeled as "Show image to friends". This URL would simply be pasted into a post and can be clicked to go to the image on the ImageShack website. Lastly, the next URL is called "Direct link to image", and is the one that links directly to the image hosted, without the host's website behind it. This direct link is the base that all the other links are made from.

One last thing. For the hotlink images, ImageShack adds a link to the ImageShack website's home page for when you click on the thumbnail/image. This is unnecessary, and may be removed if you so wish. The parts that can be removed are, "[ URL=http://imageshack.us ]" and "[ /URL ]" (both the uppercase and lowercase ones), and for websites, "<a href="http://imageshack.us">" and "</a>".

Photobucket
Image hosting, free photo sharing & video sharing at Photobucket
You must make a free account with this website, and the account is what I like most about it. It keeps all my images in one place, showing thumbnails and URLs for every single one of them ever since I started my account there. Another plus is that you can upload short videos on there as well.

Photobucket supports images in formats: gif, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp, swf, and hosts full-size images up to 1MB in size. Images over 1MB are automatically resized. Videos are supported in these formats: avi, mov, mpeg, mp4, asf, wmv, divx, 3gp, qt, dv. Videos must be under 100 MB, and less than three minutes long.

When you log in, click on the "my albums" button on the top, and choose the file you want to upload by clicking on the button that says 'Choose files'. Once you're done with that, simply click on 'Submit'. The browser will load, and you should see a green checkmark and the text "1 of 1 image has uploaded!" on the top of the page. The image then gets added to your gallery below, and you can see a thumbnail of it, as well as three links to it below that.

The first link is the direct link to the image. The second link is the html code for the image when putting it into HTML code when creating a website. The third link is the one that you would use for posting the image in this forum.

And that's all there is to it. Any feedback or corrections are welcomed!