When adding photos to your post, you have two options: 1) link the image to an external server (photobucket, el al.) or 2) upload the image here to this forum's server
1)
For external servers there are all kinds of options. I have my own web hosting account, so I have total control over the images. If you are using a few service like Photobucket, Imgur, Flickr, etc. you are totally dependent on them. But that's the only option for some. Months or years later they may go away, or change names. Like Yahoo bought Flickr and screwed it all up. I googled "Free Image Hosting" and found a good recent article:
https://www.lifewire.com/free-image-hosting-sites-3486329 The good thing about photo hosting services is they may resize the images for you. If you are hosting or uploading your own images you want to resize them first. Uploading directly from your camera or smartphone the images my be 4mb or larger which is way too big.
So to link an external image to a post you put it inside the IMG tags like (IMG) imageURL (/IMG) ... but with [ ] brackets instead of ( ) parentheses. Click on the
icon in the toolbar to automatically insert the image tags.
The good thing about this method is you can put the images anywhere in the article you want. With the attachment method, you are limited to four images, and they are attached to the bottom of your post. Here is an article I posted, with loads of images from my own server account:
http://hurricane-motorsports.com/forum/index.php?topic=2501.0The images links look like this: [ I M G ]
http://www.bobworley.com/images/tcc2017/IMG_6345.JPG [ / I M G ]
2)
The other option is to upload the image to your post directly. I think this is the best option for most because everything stays right here, in this forum/server. Just be sure the image sizes are reduced. You can tell the images that have been uploaded here because they have a caption that is the file name, then something like "viewed ## times". To upload the image to this server, click the "Attachments and other options" link below. I am uploading an image with instructions into this post: