Dealing with images on Dreamwidth
Okay, one more Dreamwidth post!
DW is geared around text posts and currently handles images rather awkwardly. But it does actually have image hosting capabilities, though the space isn't unlimited (I've never come near to maxing it out). I was thinking about that and figured I could make a post over here about how I back up images to Dreamwidth, and then post them using the Rich Text Editor.
I tried to explain what I do as clearly as I could, but the detail might make it sound more complex and difficult than it really is. I'm sorry if so! But here goes:
Step 1: Go to the main page at www.dreamwidth.org. It should look something like this:
Step 2: Click the red button in the upper-right to log in. Once you do, the main page should look something like this:
Step 3: If you look below the Dreamwidth logo, you'll see five categories of things you can do. You want the first category, "Create." Click on it and select "Upload Images" from the drop-down list. I've put a blue circle around it in the picture below:
Step 4: Upload your picture!
The picture above is the standard "Upload Images" screen. From here, you can click the link to "View all your images" to see everything you've uploaded, and I think "manage your images" lets you adjust titles and descriptions of the images and such. But what you want is the "Browse" button. It'll take you to your computer files and you can upload the picture or pictures you want.
Let's suppose I want to upload two pictures from Baldur's Gate 3:
and
Okay. So after I click "Browse", find the right folder on my computer, and use CTRL+click to select both of these pictures (you can also upload pictures one-by-one if you wish), the space below the "Browse" button will show the pictures you've uploaded. It should look something like this:
There they are! You can give the pictures names in the "Title" boxes, but if you want the file names saved, make sure you click the "Save descriptions" button below the pictures (circled in blue below):
At this point (much faster than it sounds like), you've uploaded the pictures to your account where you can look at every picture or file you've ever uploaded to Dreamwidth. That's cool, but they're not actually in a post yet.
Step 5: Make a new post.
In a new tab, open Dreamwidth (www.dreamwidth.org) again. It's important that this is in a different tab and you don't navigate away from the one your pictures are showing on.
You should see the "Post" button in the upper right of the main page, below your username. I've circled it in blue here:
Click on "Post."
That'll take you to the Create Post page where you actually put things on your blog.
I'm currently trying out the beta version of this page that's going to get applied pretty soon, so the style looks a little different here than in standard Dreamwidth. I figured I'd use the beta version because a) it's what people will see in the future, and b) we're going to use the old Rich Text Editor that is the same in both styles.
The Rich Text Editor has a blue rectangle around it and a blue arrow pointing at it in the picture above.
Let's narrow in on the Rich Text Editor. Like in any post, you can just start typing into the Rich Text Editor, if you want words at all. So here I typed a little explanation for the BG3 pictures and put the cursor where I want the pictures to show up.
You can see that there's a bar of options above what I've typed, with buttons that let you bold, italicize, underline, etc. We want a button further on—the square button with a yellow background that looks like a tiny landscape of mountains and sunshine. I've put a blue circle around it on the screenshot below:
Step 6: Add your pictures!
Clicking on the little landscape button will open a box where you can paste the URL of any image you want to put in your Dreamwidth post. The image doesn't have to be hosted on Dreamwidth—you could paste a link to a picture on Tumblr or whatever—but it'll be more stable if it is, so that's what we're doing.
It looks like this:
Since we already uploaded our pictures to Dreamwidth in the earlier steps, we just need the URLs for the pictures. There's a pretty easy way to see what it is.
Step 7: Copy-paste the URL.
Click back to the tab with your newly uploaded pictures. There will be a code at the bottom of each one. In our case, it looks like this:
It might look a bit intimidating if you're not used to code, but you can ignore the most of it. You just want that little part that begins with https and ends with .jpg.
Copy the URL (I've put a blue box around it above) and click back to the Create Post tab. The "Image Properties" box from Step 6 should still be up.
Paste the URL into the top box that says "URL." I've surrounded the correct box with a red rectangle in this picture:
Hit the "OK" button at the bottom and:
You'll see tiny boxes around the frame. Those will go away if you click anywhere other than the picture; they're for adjusting the size.
Step 8: Adjust the picture if you want
You know how Tumblr automatically stretches/shrinks pictures to make them fit? Dreamwidth just leaves them the way they are, so if your original picture is very big, it will look very big, and if it's small, it will look small. But you can adjust the picture yourself.
Maybe my picture of Shadowheart seems really big compared to the text and I want it smaller. I'll click on the tiny box in the upper-left corner of the picture (that one simply because it's the most convenient) and drag it inwards until the picture is the size I want.
And there she is!
BTW: No matter what size you make a picture look in your post, once it is posted, you can always right-click with your mouse and say "open image in new tab" to see it in its real size.
Here's a real post I made with a picture of Shadowheart I'd slightly shrunk in the Dreamwidth editor:
But if I right-click on the image and tell it to open in another tab, you can see that the saved picture is actually full-size:
So feel free to adjust your picture in the post however you want; it won't change the version you originally uploaded to Dreamwidth.
I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but that's how I get images uploaded to Dreamwidth and then embedded in Dreamwidth posts!
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