Linking to picasa web album images

[MatthewJ]

I've seen a couple people struggle with this so I thought I'd post a quick little howto. I'm FAR from a frequent user of picasa web albums, so if there's a better way, let us know here. There isn't much to it, especially if you don't use that hopeless excuse for a web browser called Internet Explorer, but I digress

I will assume you know how to access your albums at picasaweb.google.com. Open the web album containing the picture you want to link to in a forum message and find it in the album.

STEP 1) Get the image address (URL) into your copy buffer

• IE 7: right-click on the image you want and click properties. Select the entire "address: URL" value. It will start with "http:" and end with the image name. The quickest way to do this is to left-click on the address value 3 times quickly (triple left click).
• Firefox: just right click on the image in your browser and select copy image location.

note: there are IE tweaks you can get that will make this just as easy as in Firefox. We won't get into them here, just know they exist if you find the process too tedious in IE.
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STEP 2) Insert the image.

Now back in the reefsanctuary message, just click the insert image (

) button and paste in the image address copied in step 1 (right-click->paste or CTRL+V). DON'T CLICK OK JUST YET. The pasted value will look something like this:

http: //lh5.ggpht.com/_ImTny_j4wIo/SU2c54848BI/AAAAAAAAAi8/h-rAbIHOG2A/s144/DSC00607.JPG​

do you see where it says s144 in the address? That indicates the pixel size of the image to display. change this to the desired size. The available sizes appear to be s72,s144,s200,s320,s400,s512,s576,s640,s720,s800, s912,s1024,s1152,s1280,s1440,s1600. I'm not sure if there's a reefsanctuary preferred size, but I usually use s800. Now click OK.
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That's it, the image should display correctly right away. Hopefully this is useful for someone