The key to adding pictures is one of the buttons at the top of your edit box. It looks like this:

If you click on it, a little box will pop up that looks like this:

This new box allows you to do one of two things, you can enter the URL of a picture from the web in the field labelled Image URL*, or you can click on the ‘Browse’ button to either select preloaded pictures from your picture directory (if you've already loaded some) or you can click on yet another ‘Browse’ button at the bottom on the resulting selection box to choose a picture off your own hard disk. I shrank the size of this box down to almost nothing in the image below, so you can't see most of the box yet. Ignore the top of the box entirely.

To load something from your hard disk, you'll have to look at the bottom of this box. There are two important buttons, first the ‘Browse’ button, which will pop up a directory listing, from which you'll select your picture. Here's what they both look like:

Once you select the picture, click on the second button, the ‘Upload File’ button, or it will stay on your hard disk and never be copied to your picture directory on Big Closet.

Eventually, you'll see the screen change so that looks like this:

Note that your picture will be displayed, so you can easily see if you got the right image when you selected the original file.

It might have another "success" message, which means that the picture was too big, and had to be scaled to fit the maximum allowed size. Here's what it looks like:

This is a good thing, because it's courteous to readers who don't happen to have a T1 line run to their home or office. It's a good thing for you as well, because you won't have to fiddle with graphics editing programmes to tweak your pictures.

Now, there's only one step left; you have to look at the top of the box we ignored before and choose the picture you've just uploaded from the user directory listing shown at the top of your screen. Don't select ‘Delete.’ Select ‘Add.’ The same ‘Insert/Edit’ box will pop up that we saw at the start of our little journey, except this time it will have the URL box filled in. Now click the ‘OK’ button. All the fancy HTML text needed to insert a picture is now inside your text.

You can use the ‘Preview’ button at the bottom of the Edit screen to see how it looks.

Voila!

Puddin'

* Taking pictures directly from the web isn't usually a good idea. In the first place, a lot of pictures on the Web are a lot larger than many Big Closet readers can comfortably download, if they have slow connections to the Internet, and it causes Erin's server to access the Web every time a Big Closet reader views your story or blog entry, which slows things down for everyone. URL accesses take time. Time is money.