If you contribute to the Anglers' Net forums, then there may come a time when you wish to show the world an angling-related digital picture. This simple 'how-to' guide should take you through the steps needed. Advanced users may well be able to skip certain steps along the way.....

This guide is for informational purposes only. We will not be held responsible for any damage caused by following them. If in doubt, always back-up your files before trying something new.

Resizing Your Picture
There are two aspects to resizing your picture that need to be considered. They are the physical size of the picture and the resolution (often referred to as dpi - Dots Per Inch). As a guide, your picture doesn't really need to be any bigger than 450 pixels long (or tall, depending on whether it is portrait or landscape) and have a resolution of any higher than 72dpi.

That may sound complicated if you've never resized a picture, but bear with me as I show you how......

First of all, if you don't have any imaging software, download a copy of Irfanview by clicking here. This simple, yet powerful, piece of software will do all we need.

Once installed, run Irfanview. You should get a screen similar to this:

Click on File/Open:

This should show you your hard drive, like this:

Go to where your picture is and open it:

If you need to 'crop' the picture (i.e. you would rather just show a portion of the original photo), then left click on one 'corner' of where you would like the cropped picture to begin and then, keeping the left button pressed, 'drag' the cursor to where you would like to finish the cropped picture. This is a lot easier to actually do than explain, so give it a go. In the picture below, I have drawn a rectangle around the fish.:

Once you've selected an area to crop, let go of the mouse button and go to Edit/Crop Selection in the top menu:

This will leave you with the photo you desired:

Nearly there. Now all we need to do is make it the right size for the forums. Go to Image/Resize/Resample:

For the Anglers' Net forums, a maximum length or height of 450 pixels will suffice (you'll notice the 'Preserve aspect ratio box is ticked. This is important, as it keeps your photo to the original proportions.) Also, you only need DPI to be set to 72.:

That's it. Now just go to File/Save to save your file. If you want to give it a different name, thus preserving the original on your hard drive in its original state, use the File/Save as option:

Your picture is now ready for uploading:

Uploading Your File
Go to http://www.go-fishing.org/upload/ - this is a system provided free of charge, but please bear in mind that it is intended for the sole purpose of posting pictures to the Anglers' Net forums. Any abuse of this system will see it withdrawn. Also, all images are deleted from this server after approximately two months, so it is not a permanent facility.

The fields there are self explanatory. You do not need to fill out the 'Message' one.

Once your picture has been uploaded, you will be presented with the text that you need to cut and paste into your Anglers' Net forum post.

Good luck!