Screenshot-posting for beginners

How to take a screenshot, upload it to a image-host &
post it on a Board ( like Comodo's Forum )

Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words.
Screenshots can be a great help when describing a problem
with for example Your network-rules .

Taking the screenshot :

First :
You should get a specialized program to take screenshots because
it is much more flexible than the built-in Windows " PrtScn " request
that only allows you to take a picture of the entire screen
(or "Alt+PrtScn" to capture the active window)
and by default uses an inferior file-format , BMP

Using a screen-shot program you can control exactly what to
capture and the file-format ( quality ) to save it in.

I highly recommend the FREE program " FastStone Capture "
available for free legal download here :
http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

edit : From version 5.4 FastStone has changed the license to shareware.
You can download the latest version as a 30-day trial from the link above OR
get version 5.3 from here ( the license allows redistribution so it's still legal) :
http://www.portablefreeware.com/download.php?id=775

Another nice free alternative is Gadwin PrintScreen :
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/screenshotcaptor/index.html

Here is a screenshot showing You what FastStone looks like :

You can change the default hotkeys, save-directory,
file-format and other options by clicking " Settings "

To take a screenshot of your network-rules, simply open
" Network monitor " so it is the active window and press " Shift + PrtScn " .
This will take the screenshot and open the image in " FastStone editor ".
Edit the image if You like, then save it to somewhere You can remember !
You should save in either "PNG" (best quality), "GIF" or "JPEG"
(smaller file-size, acceptable quality) if you want to post the image on a board .
Never use the " BMP " format for on-line display, most boards will not accept BMP .

Uploading your screenshot to a free image-hosting service :

A image-hosting service allows you to upload a image (or images) to a server
and generates a URL (address) for each image.
You then provide the URL in your forum-post and the image is displayed in your post..
..or You could give the URL to friends/family and they could see Your holiday-pics by
entering the URL in their browser...
As you can see image-hosting can be used for many things ..
There are many different free hosting-services to choose from, these are just a few of them :

http://www.imageshack.us/
http://www.photobucket.com/
http://www.thesighost.com/
http://www.photojerk.com/

You will need to register an account with most hosting-services.

Imageshack is quite easy to use, provides " clickable thumbnails " ,
has a toolbar for IE-users and there is a great FireFox extension

Note : Some image-hosting services will "steal" the copyright to your images
and may use them for their own commercial purposes without compensating you .
Look for the smallest print in the user-agreement, that's where they usually inform you about that !

Posting Your image :

Just write the post and insert ( copy&paste ) the URL for the image .
The URL's are usually pre-formatted so You don't need to click " insert image "
You can tell if the URL is pre-formatted by making sure it looks something like this :

Code:

[img]urltoyourimage [/img]

Remember to use the " preview post " function that most boards offer .
If your image doesn't show in the preview it's usually because the formatting of the URL is wrong,
most common problem is missing the [image] bb-code or that it's doubled ..

The Comodo-forum allows you to upload your image(s) to Comodos servers
so if you just need to post your image here you are spared the trouble of registering
with a image-host ..
Note that most boards do not provide this convenient service; Just another sign of how
dedicated Comodo is to their "customers" (us) !

Some boards may have rules for image-posting, always read the board-rules first !
Remember that images require bandwidth : Try to keep the file-size as small as possible
and image size at max. 640x480 or use clickable thumbnails for large images ..
People on low-bandwidth connections will appreciate this ..