Adding Pictures for Beers and Places

try Imgur and then select the photo, copy and paste the available link

 

This is the correct procedure to follow as long as you also make sure that the pic does not exceed 20Kb (which you didn't mention as a size criteria but I suspect you know that and didn't mention as an oversight).

In what way is it failing? Pointing to the pic where it's stored? Won't upload?

 

Resizeyourimage changed their set up so it no longer works on my phone. Could never figure out picresize. Just mentioning in case anyone has other suggestions (short of transferring photos to a computer.)

 

dumb question - why is it so convoluted? I use the other beer tracking social media site and it's a snap. I'm assuming it's to conserve server storage space? i.e. by using hosting sites the native pic doesn't sit on BA servers? I'v'e loaded 500 pics over the last few years and every time it's an adventure using a free hosting site like tiny pic.

 

I shoot the pictures on my Samsung Note 8 phone, then from my camera app I share them to my Dropbox cloud service. I then go to my Windows 10 laptop and run PhotoScape, a free image editing package and;

1. Open the image on Dropbox
2. I adjust the rotation of the image if needed
   
3. I crop the image to the specified ratio
4. I adjust brightness if needed
5. I resize the image to the exact required pixel dimensions
6. I adjust the JPEG quality until the resulting size is within limits
7. I save it to disk

Then I go into the applicable beer or location page on BA and upload the image. This whole process takes me about two minutes on my laptop.

 

Sounds like what you are talking about is your picture of the beer you drinking, not the "official" picture that BA allows us to upload to show what a beer or location looks like. Since these pictures are uploaded, BA has stringent resolution, ratio, and file size requirements for consistency and to keep the size reasonable.

When we post pictures of what we are drinking or have bought, those pictures need to be hosted somewhere, are not uploaded to BA, and don't have any image format restrictions since they aren't uploaded. That may change at some point.

You are totally correct regarding free hosting sites being a PITA. Since it's free, and they need money to operate, they often inflict size restrictions, show you advertising, limit how long you can retain the imagery, throttle downloads, etc. Also free sites seem to be down a lot more than paid sites, increase restrictions, and most eventually start charging or go out of business. No free lunch. That's why I pay for Dropbox, which I use for a number of things other than beer pictures.

 

On the other social media beer rating site the quality of the pics being uploaded by every Tom Dick and Harry is excellent — you’d never be able to tell that the BA restrictions have a noticeable difference in overall image quality. Gotta be $ motivated.

 

I imagine everyone has their own way of doing it and that it takes enough steps that seems nuts to do at first but that it eventually becomes easy. I feel like my way is more straight forward some but who knows...

• First, download Gimp (an open-source Photoshop-esque program).
• Once you take a picture, open it with Gimp.
• Scale the image to the size BA likes (150x300).
  
• Save it as a jpg.
  
• When you go to save it a box opens where you can tell it how big to make it (smaller than 20kb).
• Upload it.

Anyway, that's how I do it and at this point I think it takes under a minute.

The main issue for this method is that I can't do it all on my phone, the actual pic adjustment and upload is always on my laptop. Other than that, I feel like it is pretty easy.

 

Just to be clear, are you talking the huge full-page images that folks post in the WBAYDN, NBS, and Beer Haul threads, which are hosted elsewhere? Or are you talking about the tiny uploaded pictures in the pages for beers or places, such as the ones below? The reason I ask is that you're describing the pictures as excellent, but with the upload restrictions the beer and places pics can't be called excellent.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/49734/314247/
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/49734/

 

Talking about the fact that every photo loaded to BA requires third party server as apposed to the other beer related social media site that starts w a U which requires zero third party sites for loading pics.

 

I probably should not have said 20Kb because I don't think I have been able to upload one with that number. My experience has been that if a pic is 19.5Kb, that number gets rounded upward to 20 which produces an error message from BA. So under 19.5 should work.

 

Thanks. Gimp isn’t supported on iPhones.

 

It isn't supported on Android either. I have to use my computer regardless. I run Linux, but looking at their download site, it does work for OSX and Windows. The transfer from phone to laptop to BA is definitely the part that is still a PITA for me, but I've gotten to where I can do it pretty quickly.

 

Honestly, the system I used before was cumbersome enough:

• Take photo on phone.
• Edit photo on phone by rotating 90 degrees, saving, then rotating 270 degrees back to original and saving again. (If I didn’t edit photo myself before resizing, BA’s auto system wouldn’t usually accept photo. Not sure why.)
• Then select 150x300 on resizeyourimage.
• Then zoom in or out at least twice before cropping to that size. (If I didn’t do that, BA’s auto system wouldn’t usually accept the photo. Not sure why.)
• Then save to my phone.
• Then upload. If I followed those steps, BA would accept 90% of time. If it didn’t, start over and it usually would accept on second or third try doing the exact same thing. For a handful of attempts, though, I just gave up.

That system worked for over 100 photos, because even though it was clunky, at least I could just tool around on my phone. Downloading photos to my computer is asking too much for me.