the occasional post

Sometimes, an image is worth a thousand words. You've read a fic, and the only way to respond to it is with a picture. Maybe this is a scribble you drew in the notes app on your phone, maybe it's art you drew with actual artistic talent, maybe it's a meme you just looked up, maybe it's a meme you just made. But you have your image, and you want to put it in someone's comments. How do you do that?

Ao3 comments support HTML, so to embed an image you need an image link to where the image is hosted somewhere on the web, and you need a bit of HTML code. First thing, the image.

You can use a site like Imgur to host your image, or a private tumblr post, or a fandom image host like Squidge Image Hosting. The important thing is that you want the actual image URL, and not the link to the page that the image is hosted on. Let's say you put your image in a private tumblr post, it would look something like this to get the image link.

You want to right-click (or control-click, whatever works on your screen) to get this dropdown menu, and go down to Copy Image Address. That drops the URL into your clipboard. And then you copy this code:

<img src="YOUR IMAGE URL" alt="DESCRIPTION OF YOUR IMAGE" border="0" width="Max-width 95%" />

In order that's the code that tells the HTML which image to pull off the web, a description that will work for screen readers, telling it that it doesn't need a border, and a bit of code that will keep the image from running off the screen if you grabbed a big image. You put your image URL in that bit of code and write a fast description, and then bingo, you're ready to post your image!

Oh god though, you're on mobile, that all looks awful: quick tip! If you host your image on images.squidge.org, they will do the html for you. It's free fandom image hosting as long as you're over 18. Upload your image, and then scroll down on the page, and there's a convenient button with the HTML just done for you already.

Scroll down to HTML and hit the copy button, and then just paste that into the Ao3 comment box, update the image description (cause it'll just have the title there) and you're good to go!

Go forth and decorate the world with images!