Guide: Screenshots

By Obst

PLEASE DO NOT HOST THESE GUIDES ANYWHERE ELSE!

Index of other Guides by Obst to NavyField

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Table of content:

Introduction
The tool to take Screenshots: If you cannot see the Advanced Options in BO Shot
How to show Screenshots (or pictures in general) on the NF-Forums: HTML Code to show Screenshots (or pictures in general)
Other Image Hosts, how to shorten URLs

INTRODUCTION

Ever wondered on how to take Screenshots in a fast and easy way?

Or don't you know how to post Screenshots on Forums in HTML Code (eg. the NF Forum)?

Below, I will show you an utility that helps you take Screenshots and the code you need to use on the forums

THE UTILITY

The utility I suggest you to use for screenshots is BO Shot (Click to download!).

The tool takes screenshots you take via the "PRINT SCREEN" button, labels them with a number and saves them to a folder. Ideal for taking multiple screenshots in a row.

When minimised the tool stays in the tray, so it is almost invisible and not disturbing, but it hogs almost no system resources and therefore I have it in my autorun.

Short Introduction:

The tool was produced by Bjoern Bastian and is Freeware.

I have not discovered any bugs caused by BO-Shot yet.

IF YOU CANNOT SEE THE ADVANCED OPTIONS

In rare cases, some people are unable to see the Advanced Options, no matter what they do.

In this case, please download and install this update, which should fix this problem.

HOW TO SHOW SCREENSHOTS ON THE FORUMS

First, you need to upload your Screenshot.
Make sure that it is in .jpg/.jpeg format/filetype, else it is too big.
BO-Shot can take pictures in the .jpg/.jpeg format/filetype, but if you already have a picture in another format (most likely .bmp),
you can use MS-Paint to convert it, or any other image-editing program.

If you made sure that the picture/screenshot you want to upload is in .jpg/.jpeg format,
you may then use a free image host like imageshack.us or tinypic.com to upload your pictures.

I suggest using tinypic.com, because the link to the picture is quite short. Long links sometimes don't work on the NF-Forums.

Now, I'll use tinypic.com as an example on how to upload your image.

1) Go to tinypic.com
2) Click the "BROWSE"-button
3) Find and select the picture/screenshot you want to upload
4) Click the "HOST IMAGE"-button

Once it is uploaded (speed depends on your internet connected), you will find yourself on a screen like this:

Here, locate the box below "Direct Link for Layouts", it's the third one from the top:

Now, mark that link and copy it! (Press CTRL+C)

You can also click the Copy Button to the right of that box to copy it! However, this might not work depending on your browser settings!

NOTICE: Combining BO-Shot with tinypic.com works very good in NF, except for one occasion:

Screenshots in the Shipyard (with default jpeg-quality settings).

Those pics will turn out larger in size than 250kb, which means that tinypic would resize them.

For such cases, please refer to this section of the Guide on how to use other image hosts.

However, I still advise you to use tinypic.com as the default host for anything but this situation, since it is fast and easy to use.

THE HTML CODE

This works with all kinds of pictures you have the URL to (as long as it is uploaded somewhere, NOT on your HDD!)

Once you copied the link, use the following code to show it on the forums:

Just put it in your post, and replace the "LINK HERE" part with the link you just copied from tinypic.com.

Note: The most-common mistake is to use img scr, while it should be img src. The src comes from SouRCe.

It should look like this:

If you have done it correctly, your image will then display.

SUCCESS! If your image does not appear, please check the above steps again!

Other Image Hosts, How to shorten URLs

There is not only tinypic.com as a location to host your pictures, other examples are photobucket.com or imageshack.us.

However, with some hosts you have the problem that URLs might become very long, and for example on the NF forums you cannot have links (including the img src code) which are longer than one line in the REPLY-field.

For such occasions, use tinyurl.com.

It's a simple and free service that "shortens" your URLs, just copy/paste the long URL into the input-box on the site and press the "Make TinyURL!" button, then just use the resulting URL you are given in the Image Code on the forums..