I want to encourage all ABS members to share photos of their work on the Forum and in the Gallery but you must follow the Forum Rules and Guidelines. Your images must be sized to no larger than 800x800 with a file size no larger than 135k.

Forum Moderator Steve Culver has prepared a tutorial that will assist you in re-sizing your photos not only for the ABS Forum but also your own website and this is the link to his article, Click: Photo Editing

Not all of of our users have high speed internet and larger file sizes will load very slowly for them and use our diskspace capacity limit on the hosting server.You can post your images on the Forum by either posting a link using the image button or by attaching and uploading the image file from your computer to our server. To attach the file use the attachment box at the bottom of the screen and browse to the location of the image on your computer. Click on the Post New Topic instead of the Preview Post and it will appear at the bottom of your message.

There are other places on the Forum for photos and again there are size specifications for items such as Avatars and Profile photos. The following is a general guide for photo posting size rules. I will address software and methods for you to use to reduce the size of your photos for posting on the Forum in another post.

The maximum size for Avatars is set at 90 x 90 pixels

The maximum size for Personal Profile Photos is no larger than 170 pixels by 240 pixels

The maximum size for photos is set at 800 x 800 pixels with a file size no larger than 135k

The maximum number of photos to post in a single thread is 10.

The file types for images or the "valid postable image extensions" for the Forum are gif, jpeg, jpg, and png.

The Gallery has the "Member's Work Gallery" category where each member can set up an album of photos of their knives. The Gallery also has the "Member's Events" category for members to use and set up an album to post photos of their bladesmithing events or ABS events where they have taken photos.

These instructions will assist you in uploading your photos to the Gallery:

1.) Log into the ABS Forum

2.) Click on "My Controls"

3.) Click on "Your Albums"

4.) Click "Create Album"

5.) Type the text for the title and description of the image. Please include your name in the title. This is an important step and helps make the image and your name visible to search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

6.) Check the box if you would like the album to be visible to the community.

7.) Click on "Your Albums" again

8.) From the drop down menu click "Upload Image"

9.) Type the text for the caption and description.

10.) Click "Add Image"

The maximum size for photos posted to the Gallery is 600 x 480 pixels with a file size no larger than 50k.

Members can have one (1) individual photo album of their work in the "Member's Work Gallery" and one (1) album of bladesmithing event photos in the "Member's Events" category. The maximum number of photos allocated for each member album is ten (10).

I hope these rules and instructions assist you and look forward to seeing photos of your work posted on the ABS Forum and Gallery.