1) This walkthrough assumes that you have a Gmail account. If not, here is information on creating a Gmail account.
2) Log into Gmail, click on the "Google Apps" icon in the upper right (looks like a 3x3 grid of dots), and select "Google Drive" from the popup menu:
<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1xRPrDz_ ... DtJMuBGk6C">
(Alternatively, you can just go directly to drive.google.com and sign in with your Gmail email address and password.)
3) Upload the picture(s) you want to embed in a forum post to your Google Drive. You can do this by dragging and dropping the files or through other methods.
4) Right click on the image you wish to embed. Click "Get shareable link"
<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1MsyXAHA ... XL11-Dpyn3">
5) Click to switch on Link Sharing
<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1Sjw1lUT ... sB8GN7U6fG">
6) Select and copy the link
<img src="https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1WVhEPyy ... IpSiM7srs8">
7) The link you copied takes you to the Google Drive photo viewer web app. This is NOT a direct link to the actual image file, so it can't be embedded in a forum post. But you can easily change the link.
In the example above, what I copied when I shared an image was the following (if you click it, you'll see that you're taken to the Google Drive photo viewer):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1w97S7rymYLXIgGzdsupwJEkTBoOGMJxn
If you change the word "open" to "uc", you will now have a link directly to the image file, which can be embedded in a forum post:
https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1w97S7rymYLXIgGzdsupwJEkTBoOGMJxn
So at the spot in your forum post that you want to embed an image, type:
Code: Select all
<img src="PasteImageLinkHere">
Make sure that the check box for "Disable HTML in this post" is not checked before submitting your forum post. Note that the BBCode [img] tag does not seem to work properly in our forums, so I've used the HTML img tag instead.
This is how I do it. There may be better/easier options for free image hosting. If so, please reply with details!