To show your pictures on the Doll Discussion Board:

1. Your image has to be in electronic form to use it on the web. If you have a digital camera, that will do the job. If you have a hard copy of your picture, it needs to be scanned into electronic form. If you don't have a scanner (and don't have a friend that has a scanner!), try Kinkos or anyplace that develops film. They can either scan it for you, or create a picture CD for you to use on your machine.

2. Once the picture is in electronic form, on your computer, a floppy disk, or a CD, it needs to be placed somewhere on the web. You have two options:

a. If you pay an Internet Service Provider (ISP) like AOL or AT&T or MSN, you have free webspace provided as part of that service. Get a technical rep from your ISP online or on the phone and have them walk you through uploading your images there if necessary.

b. Or you can use a service that provides picture hosting. Right now, RanchoWeb provides free image hosting for the first 1 MB of space (that's enough room for about 50 photos). RanchoWeb also provides an area where you can practice your html commands to make sure that your picture is coming out correctly - HTML Practice Board. If you want to check out other picture hosting sites, go to Geekaw's Me Page for a list of other options.

If you've already used EBAY's IPIX images for an auction, the commercial image hosting sites like RanchoWeb use the same Browse and click method to upload to their sites. Browse your drive A if saved to floppy disk; drive C for hard drive location; drive D to find it on CD.

Whichever picture-hosting site you use, once your picture is uploaded, it will have a UNIQUE URL (ADDRESS) that will look something like this - Link. Every picture you upload will have its own name/address.

3. Now you've uploaded your image and you're ready to post it. To get it to post, you need to tell the board your "image source" using this html command:

<img src=http://www.yourpicturehostingsite.com/youraccountname/yourpicturename.jpg>

The brackets that are used in this command are found on the "comma" and "period" keys on your keyboard. There are no spaces except between "img" and "src".

THAT'S IT!

As a courtesy, please reduce/resize your images to a reasonable size - 25 - 50 KB is about right. If you aren't sure, you are pretty close just by choose the "half" designation when editing the image. The bigger the picture, the longer it takes to load. If you need to resize your pictures, there's a Rough Image Manipulator at RanchoWeb or you can download the free image editor Irfanview.