Greetings . . . we’ve had several discussions around the topic of photo hosting and the ease/difficulty of posting photos here on the Forums.
I recently linked a Swap Meet posting out on Facebook and was surprised to see photos attached directly to the thread:
Swap Meet circa Aug '19 It seems that when the Swap Meet Forum was created back in 2011 the administrator enabled permissions for file attachments. To date we’ve had just a few posters find and take advantage of this feature. It is the only Discussion Forum on our site where the File Manager has been enabled. I am going to leave it configured as it is useful for buyers and sellers alike. File size is limited to just 50K. I am open to increasing that size limit.
In addition I have configured the File Manager to be available in all Discussion Forums for Club Members. When creating a post you will find the File Manager link in the Post Options below the posting text box:
clicking the link will open the File Manager in a pop-up window (make sure your browser is not blocking pop-ups for our site):
the utility is pretty straightforward just browse for the file, select it and then click the 'Add file' button. Once you have uploaded your files click 'Done adding files'.
It seems that it will be a handy approach for quickly attaching an image or two on the fly – but there are some limitations.
First, the Attachments summary appears at the end of the Post just before the poster’s signature (if any). The images cannot be placed in context within the flow of the discussion – like one can with IMG links from the Photo Library or external hosting source.
Secondly, the behavior of the links in the Attachments summary is a bit of a head-scratcher. What little documentation I have found suggests that “the attachments are made available for download.” Which is what I typically find when accessing our site using Mozilla Firefox on a PC:
But sometimes the images actually render – which is what I noticed when following the link to our Forums from Facebook on my Android phone.
In other browsers' the behavior can be puzzling where some appear as links, while others render:
Peculiar behaviors aside – the files are online and can be accessed with right-click to load or save etc.
In addition to images, we can also use the File Manager to attach detailed documents like PDFs, Word Docs or even Spreadsheets. I currently have the size limited to just 400K (with Images in mind). Should you have a larger technical document that you would like to get attached just send me a PM I am happy to get it online and available to the community.
Regards,
stock49
