Uploading photos, a stupid question

[Badr12]

I am a follower for the forum for long time, I recently decided that my photos may be decent enough to contribute I have Mac and occasionally use pc, I struggled very much to upload pictures, is it a must to resize jpegs, and how
Is there a dumb-proof guide for that
Thanks
Badr

[marcusBMG]

How you might crop and resize your pics depends on how you want to present them and the nature of the pic. Personally it seems to me that around xga (ie 1024 x 786 pixels) is a pretty appropriate image size to cover the range of monitors that people might be using and avoid any need to scroll, be of a pretty quick upload/download size, yet large enough to display the pic.
I use faststone, a free download image viewer with a solid set of editing tools (though I will normally " PP" my image in lightroom which has a more sophisticated suite of image processing tools).
In faststone I'll crop, resize to the size I want, sharpen a little bit (resizing down makes the image softer so that's to compensate), then save the mage to upload usually under a new name like image-xga.jpg. I'll normally drop the jpg compression 10 points or so from best quality 98 to 88 (done with one click on the slider in faststone) to reduce the upload size. For best quality I upload to the server I use for my web site rather than using the [upload picture] box on mflenses and write in the bbcode to link the pic in like this:

[WolverineX]

[philslizzy]

I link through flickr, fotki and others, I also upload directly. I don't resize them, the forum does that automatically to fit on the page, clicking on the image gives a full size rendition.

It's not absolutely necessary to resize.

[Badr12]

Thank you guys for the datailed responses

[StillSanj]

I've come to find out there are no stupid questions at MFlenses forum. These guys rock : )

[DConvert]

[Badr12]

https://flic.kr/p/tvbaT2

My son
Got this lens recently, Sony NEX 3 ISO 200 1/400

[DConvert]

I like a nice mirror lens

In Flickr there's a share option that allows you to Copy & paste BB code (in a range of sizes) into forums.
On most forums that displays as a photo of the size you selected whithout any need for people to follow links.
IIRC Flickrs own discussions section is the only place I've not been able to use BBcode for adding images on-line.

[Lightshow]

DPreview doesn't handle BBcode at all, I upload full size images to Flickr, then people can see the full size image if they want, I find their quality of resizing to be good enough, if you want to control the resizing and final sharpening, then upload the shot as you intend to post it, then use the original link.
Some people worry about their image being stolen, I'm not that concerned at this point in time that I'm going to upload only small pictures or watermark them, though it's your right to do so, just keep in mind that it can effect the viewers experience, and if my only source of income was my pictures, I would likely limit the size and watermark them. Most of my pictures I post are for illustration of what the camera and/or lens can do, so full size is preferable.

[Badr12]

Thanks again for the input, very useful