creating "clickable" thumbnails for forums or listings

The photobucket small clickable thumbnails are a great way to put lots of pictures into your forum posts or listings because they are quick to load and people can click to enlarge the pictures they are interested in if they want a bigger picture. They are great for ebay as you can put as many as you like into your listing without having to pay the extra .25c for each picture!

Step 1.
To create thumbnails first log into your photobucket account and click the little box next to each picture you want to put in the listing - this will put a tick in the box. For this example I will do 6.

Step 2.
After you have ticked the boxes you need then scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a button that says "generate HTML and IMG code"

Step 3.
clicking this will open a new page with a series of boxes. The top box is recommended and you just click it and the code will be automatically copied (a yellow message will confirm this). You can click the preview button to see what they look like if needed.

Step 4.
switch to html on your listing/forum message, click the clipboard and allow access. Click "apply" and "ok" and then you can switch back to plain text to see if you have what you need. You can play around with the order of the pics by clicking and dragging them. If they are all clumped together place the cursor inbetween and hit the spacebar a few times to give more of a gap. Note if you "play with" them too much they will lose their ability to be "clicked". You may want to do each one separately if you keep losing the blue line around them which shows they are clickable. Should look like this:

photobucket forum posting

For anyone needing help to put pictures into forums follow these step by step instructions.

BEFORE STARTING make sure your pictures are of a reasonable size! Put the little hand icon onto the centre of your picture you want to post, click and wait for it to load, notice how long this takes and how big the image is (remember not everyone has high speed broadband). Images for posting should be resized to "Website, Email (320 x 240)". This is the largest size that should be used, unless of course you need a super-sized picture for a specific reason - then you should create a clickable thumbnail and people and choose to enlarge it or not. Now to put them onto the forum:

In a new window open OZtion and go into the forums. Leave this window open so you can switch between windows to practise.

Open your OZtion forum message box, type your advert/listing with any text style you chooseTHEN TRY EITHER a) the quick option or b) the medium option or c) the slow option. If you use a browser other than Internet Explorer you may have trouble doing the quick version as some don't allow right-clicking and copy/pasting and the medium version never seems to work with me, it just hangs there and doesn't put the pic in. Choose what works for you!

a) the quick version:
Click on the picture you want to insert in the forum message (click the actual picture, not the 4 links to it underneath), when it opens then right-click it and choose "copy". Then go into your message and right-click again and choose "paste". Your picture should be there. If not try b) the medium version or c) the long version below.

b) the medium version:

In photobucket, click the link under the picture you want to use:

Share URL

URL Link <------ choose this one

HTML Tag

IMG Code

In the OZtion window find the little green picture icon like pic here:

and when it opens a new window that looks like this (yes it is in a funny language!):

Right click and paste the link into the "source" line (where I have put a yellow circle above). After that click the "insert" button at the bottom right. Note this never works for me, I only use a or c, but it seems to work for others so worth mentioning as it may work for you.

c) the long version:

Go to photobucket and choose the image you would like to put in a forum like OZtion's SPOTD. You will have 4 choices under each picture that say:

Share URL
URL Link
HTML Tag <----- choose this one
IMG Code

Make sure you click the second-last option "HTML tag". When you do a message with a yellow background comes up and says "copied".

Then open your OZtion forum message box, type your advert/listing with any text style you choose and when it comes to putting picture in click the html button on the top right of the OZtion box next to the eraser icon (see pic below).

A new smaller window will open looking like this:

and if you read through the text you will find the end of your advert. Then simply click the little clipboard icon at the top of the smaller window page where I have indicated with the red line and make sure you say yes to allow access to the clipboard. Then you click "apply" and "ok" at the bottom right of the screen.

Switch back to the plain text and click preview to see if it all looks fine. Once you are back in plain text you can move your picture around, center it or whatever.

These instructions will work with single photo's, slideshows or any other photobucket pics (go to instructions further down to insert multiple thumbnails as they are very handy forum posts and even within your listings).

If I follow those instructions I get this:


If I do it wrong and just paste the text onto the plain text page (and not the html page) you will just get the text link and not an actual picture like this:
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w47/swapcardsandmore/Tuesday27March2007.jpg or [IMG]http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w47/swapcardsandmore/Monday23July20072.jpg[/IMG]