Attach and Insert Photos Into Forum PostsIndex of Links:-
Important Note-
How To: Browse for the Photos-
How To: Insert a Photo (Attachment 1)-
An Example of How To: Insert a Photo into a Post-
How To: Add More Photos (Attachments)-
Limitations and Example Image Code-
Early Precautions-
Issues with Attaching and Inserting Photos
Important NoteLet's bring some color to the site shall we? I invite you to share your gameplay images within topics in an easier way, and story authors may enjoy having their images and posting taken care of in one place.
We have had numerous requests to bring the gallery feature back to the forum. However that presented some serious issues. For one, we had to moderate another entire area. Additionally, people would upload images that were large and then not use them in their stories. We could not keep track of those that were necessary and those that were just sitting there. It was used as storage space, and images were not compressed until they were put on the forum. So they were big, and that's bad. We only had 80GB of storage space on the old server and the gallery grew to 15GB due to uncompressed images. It was unsustainable, so I had to pull the plug.
Now that we have a more scalable server, I realized we can incorporate something using the forum's own attachment system so went hunting for a mod to do just that. A wonderful pair of SMF modders hath delivered. Resize Attached Images by Kays allows us to keep them at a reasonable size for both storage and bandwidth concerns, while dougiefresh's Post and PM Inline Attachments lets us put the attachments
inside posts.
There are limitations to doing it this way, though it's really easy to share a single picture to help someone or to show off some accomplishment. Using this system for something that requires as many pictures as a story means planning ahead, know what images you need and where.
We cannot preview the images until they've been uploaded to the forum. However, we can easily insert them in the right places if we rename them in a number sequence or else take note of the filenames of pictures we want to place between paragraphs. A little imagination can make this easier.
Edit: The Forum supports JPG (jpeg), BMP, PNG, and GIF image types. The last kind will not work as animated, it will be converted to jpeg by default.
Please have your screenshots in jpg format.
** If you need help with this, please feel free to post questions or if you want to try attaching some photos, please do so in this thread!! 
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Browse for the PhotosPick a Photo from the folder where you've collected images from your story. It's 10x easier if you rename them something like 1, 2, 3, etc.
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Insert a Photo (Attachment 1)From the attachment interface, select
Insert Attachment 1, 2, 3, etc. as you go. The image you've selected to upload will be placed in the current location of the cursor.
An Example of how to do this step:http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/index.php?topic=26583.msg443688#msg443688Back to top
More AttachmentsMore attachments at the bottom, will let you open many more 'Choose file' boxes.
Now continue those 4 simple steps. You can place the cursor and insert the next attachment each time. We do not yet allow multiple uploads at once, though it's safe to say it is not too hard as your browser will remember where you last opened a file
Don't forget to insert the photos into the message. - This way, they're not only attached to the post, but they're inserted into the message.
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Limitations and Example Image CodeLimitations: If you preview the post, you'll see [ Invalid Attachment ] where your pictures are. Why? They're not uploaded to the server yet. Compose your story or post assuming the picture will be there when you hit post. If you need a caption directly below it, assume putting a
attach id=4 msg=443597 float=center (Let's pretend there are [brackets] around that)
[b]Caption[/b]: directly beneath the picturewill turn out right, and also float the image to the center of the page if you like. Just don't go right, trust me, it'll look weird..
See the code for the attachments? Those are the message id of the post, and the number of the attachment. So the 4th one I uploaded will go there. Crafty Simmers might even skip clicking insert and relocating the cursor 15 times and instead just copy (Ctrl + C) that code, paste it (Ctrl +V) and change the id= to the next attachment number.
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Early PrecautionsEarly Precautions: Because server security may kick you off for uploading many files, please compose your story post in notepad or copy it before you hit post and begin the upload on something with many pictures. Preview is safe, though as I said the images won't work until done. I don't want you to lose work. This should only be necessary for a while. I will tweak things to give people room to upload on slow internet.
Images will be downsampled to be 800x450 pixels. The rationale for this is 1. data size for storage space and 2. data size for people on mobile plans who read your stories.
You are free to continue using other image hosting options, though people with slow internet will greatly prefer downloading the 30-90kb images you share here to 2MB colossal uncompressed images that can make a page require 45 Megabytes of download with 15 images. The whole post can be the size of one image.
If you don't use a program like Irfanview to change your files from PNG to JPG it may take some time to upload them, especially if they are directly from the game
and you have slow internet. You may actually save some upload time if you batch replace them first. Mrsflynn has a tutorial for using Paint to convert an image
here. I personally recommend Irfanview
[Download Here] because it will let you press the 'B' key, and navigate to your story pictures folder. From there you can add all, tinker the options and change them to JPG all at once. Be sure to set an output folder (you can simply make a folder inside the current one).
How-To: Use Irfanview.
We have the rule of using .jpg instead of .png as it saves space on storage space and bandwidth.
Thank you all for being members, and collectively creating this awesome, kind, and helpful community. I hope this new feature works out, I'll try to help if things go wrong. Please keep backups of your pictures just in case the system bugs out on us. It looks stable enough for mass-use and both mods have undergone plenty of revisions since their initial release.
You can practice uploading in this thread. We'll leave it up a couple weeks then move it to the member zone where it can exist as a tutorial of sorts
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Issues with Attaching and Inserting PhotosHere are some troubleshooting tips to try:
1. Log out of the forum and close the browser. Then open it again and try the attachment again.
2. Clear your browser's cache to see if it helps.
https://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser%27s-Cache3. Make sure you have the profile layout option "Show WYSIWYG editor on post page by default" is not checked. If this option is checked it will make the attachments not work correctly.
Go to: Home Menu > Profile > Modify Profile > Look and Layout
As seen in this photo:
Click image to see larger view
