Adding Photos to Your Journal With AOL Pictures Permalinks

So, back in October 2005, I did an entry explaining why you shouldn't add photos directly to your blog using AOL Pictures.

I'm not going to recreate the entry -- essentially, at the time, AOL Pictures wasn't designed to support hosting of pictures for Web pages. If you tried to add photos to your blog outside of the AOL Pictures integration, it would work for a while, but eventually it would "break."

Well, you can forget all that now: Go crazy with hotlinking pictures that are in your AOL Pictures albums. Here's how.

A couple of weeks ago, the AOL Pictures team instituted permalinks, which means you can now easily include AOL Pictures photos in your Journals -- the big kind, not the gallery thumbnails with the border.

Here's the description of permalinks from the AOL Pictures team's blog entry:

"Essentially the Permalink feature gives you a direct URL to an individual picture.  You can then embed this picture anywhere you want to -- on your blog, in an ebay auction page,  on a web page (like hometown, myspace), in an email."

Bonus: Your AOL Pictures photo storage space is unlimited -- if you use AOL Pictures for your Web storage, it doesn't count against your 100 MB of Web storage per Screen Name.

Here's how it works with your AOL Journal:

1. Create an album and upload pictures to AOL Pictures.
   
   
2. Select the photo that you want to put in your blog. You'll see a hyperlink that says Permalink -- click the link:
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. When you click Permalink, a box will pop up with the Web address (URL) of the picture. This is where the picture "lives." Click the green "Select" button, which will highlight the URL:
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Copy the URL of the photo to your clipboard. You can do this by either right-clicking and selecting "Copy", or using the keyboard command Ctrl+C (hitting the Control key and the letter C at the same time).
   
   
5. Go to your Journal. Create a new entry or edit an old one. Click the Add Image button -- it's the little camera icon on the right of the tool bar:
   
   (Note: You can only click the camera button when you're in "Text" editing mode -- the pulldown in the left of the formatting toolbar will say "View as Text".)
   
   
6. In the box that comes up, paste the URL you copied from before. (Either right-click with your mouse and select Paste, or use the keyboard command Ctrl+V (Control and the letter V)
   
   
7. Hit "OK", and you should see the photo in your blog:
   
   
   
   
   

That's it. If you've used another image host like Photobucket or Imageshack with your Journal, the process is pretty similar.

Also, as the AOL Pictures guys write, you have your choice of several sizes. Right now, you have to fiddle with the URL; for example, here's the direct link to my example photo:

http://links.pictures.aol.com/pic?id=4e607JbBEZLErHOc03-PRMjgOisi-MHfY1lOv4xQp5Fd3Ig=&size=l

See the "size=l"? (L is for "Large"). That's the large size, up to 768x512:

If you change size=1 to size=m (M is for Medium), you will get the medium size, up to 384x256:

Or, size=t -- (T is for Thumbnail) -- gives you up to 160x106:

And lastly, size=s (S is for Small Thumbnail), up to 96x64.

It's not the most convenient thing in the world, but it's a start.

Anyway, play around with the AOL Pictures permalinks, and see what you think. The AOL Pictures folks are working on a lot of stuff and they want to hear from you, so see what's new and check out their blog: The AOL Pictures Blog.

[Update, 6/22: Journaler Csandhollow reports that animated gifs you upload to AOL Pictures won't display the animation, so if you want to put animated gifs in your Journal, you'll need to continuing using your Web storage space, via File Manager, SFTP, AOL FTP or a standalone FTP client over your AOL connection. Thanks for the report.]

Thanks -- Joe
Tags: AOL Journals, AOL Pictures, permalinks