screen pics to DonationCoder forum (trying zScreen)

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

I used to struggle with this picture thing to a forum a bit, especially if the pic was on my drive. 

On this thread :
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=27802.0

I tried zScreen,
http://code.google.com/p/zscreen/

A quite robust freeware, open source, which has built-in uploads to ImageShack and some alternatives. Note, it does use Net 2.0, most of us have that in the innards of our puters already.

The whole setup and learning was just a few minutes. And I was quite pleased. Very intuitive.

Now I know there are many alternatives, I tried Jing a while back. So far, for the basic cropped pic to a public website with the url immediately available without bureaucracy, zScreen is very impressive.  (A lot of times open source projects are sparse on interface and configuration, yet zScreen is very robust.)

Do we have a preference on .png vs. .jpg or anything else?

Do we have a preference as to the pic being on a remote server or being uploaded to the DonationCoder server.  I guess theoretically, given the right Donationcoder wording, the forum could automatically download such pictures with an automated bot, if we want to be sure of longer longevity. 

Or perhaps there is a way to make the transition manually when we do the pic.  However, that would only be if it were a DonationCoder preference to serve its own pancakes.

Shalom,
Steven

[mouser]

Do we have a preference on .png vs. .jpg or anything else?

Screenshots should almost always be .png not .jpg.
Jpeg does a terrific job of lossy compression of photographs, but the lossiness is unacceptable in computer screenshots.  Png is lossless and gives good compression on screenshots where there is often large areas of solid colors.

Do we have a preference as to the pic being on a remote server or being uploaded to the DonationCoder server.

We *STRONGLY* discourage people from linking to pictures on a remote site.. Mainly because DC lives forever but other sites do not.  Better to have all pictures attached to forum posts where they will live and die and move with the forum content itself.

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

If I have the url of the remote site, could you remind me of how to make that transferred over to DC ?

In this case I have :

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/8720/screenshot2011090607423.png

Which can be put inside an IMG tag and thus go to imageshack.
What is the process for having that on the DC server.
(Apologies if this is a trivial question that I learned a dozen times before.)

When I go to "Attach" it immediately starts wanting to browse my disk.

My goal here is to avoid downloading the pic, naming it and then uploading from disk, granted that does not take too long. and if that is the way, will do.

Steven

[mouser]

Unfortunately, the correct way to do it is to download the file to your pc, then attach it as an upload when you post.

It might be nicer if we implemented a feature that would ask the forum to automatically grab the image from the remote site and save it as a file attachment on the dc server, but that currently does not exist.

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

Now I am going to test a similar ListPro pic to the one on the other thread, using an upload.



Ok, that works identically well, just takes a bit longer to do the two-step.
That is using
attachimg=n = "inline fullsize attachment"
The scroll bar is only at the bottom of the post, I guess since it is widening the whole body. In this case I used a wide-angle lens.  So one trick, if the scroll bar is important, let the pic be its own post.

For some purposes a smaller one might be better.  We might want to have a sample post that shows Thumb, Display Attachment etc.  (if we do not have one handy).

I see that the type of pic I did before (my post right above, when I was playing) starts off small, but when you mouse-click it then it becomes the same as this one.  So that has its nice elements too.  However, that was simply a direct outside web url, which we want to avoid.

mouser, I realize screenshot captor might do a lot of this stuff nicer than zScreen !  However, zScreen is surprisingly neat for what it does.  I have not done real comparisons.

From post #57 of the thread given by Mouser below:

MatthewSchenker
....  May I make some suggestions?
       > "inline display attachment" - fine the way it is
       > "inline fullsize attachment" - fine the way it is
       > "inline thumb attachment" - fine the way it is
       > "inline noimage attachment" - should instead be "inline attachment from URL"
       > "inline noimage attachment (no details)" - should instead be "inline link to attached file"

Even in that superb thread, it takes a little time to figger out what is what with the five options.  Six if you include the direct web url I tried above that we want to avoid .

The first 3 options look similar, identical methodology, simply changing the display mode. 
I'm still puzzling out the bottom two.

Steven

[mouser]

This thread shows how to attach uploaded images as thumbnails or in a variety of ways:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1996.0

[Steven Avery]

Unfortunately, the correct way to do it is to download the file to your pc, then attach it as an upload when you post. It might be nicer if we implemented a feature that would ask the forum to automatically grab the image from the remote site and save it as a file attachment on the dc server, but that currently does not exist.

As I indicate above, the difference is minor, after testing.  More conceptual. It is nice to throw a pic on the web and let it give you a url, but your upload mechanism is very simple too once you get the hang of it.

[kyrathaba]

It might be nicer if we implemented a feature that would ask the forum to automatically grab the image from the remote site and save it as a file attachment on the dc server, but that currently does not exist.

That seems like it would be a very valuable feature to implement, as it would ensure the integrity of multimedia posts in perpetuity.