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Big Beautiful Photos on Craig’s List

October 21, 2011 by debbie T | Digital Photography • Internet

I was posting an ad on Craig’s List today, and noticed how crappy the photos looked after uploading them to Craig’s List. Yuck! There had to be a better way. I tried compressing them further, and no luck, Craig’s List still compressed them further and they looked horrible!

After googling, I found a forum post that helped! I never realized that you could upload your photo files elsewhere online, and then link to them using the html tag! Awesome!

So, I resized and optimized my photos again (larger) and uploaded them to my Google’s Picasa Web Album. From there, it’s easy to set up a link.

Here are the details:

Picasa Web Album

Note: this tutorial is specifically written for google’s Picasa online photo management, but you can use many other online photo management web sites like flickr or photobucket. But if you have a gmail account (and I strongly recommend that you do, especially if you’re regularly posting on Craig’s List), then you automatically have your own Picasa photo account.

In Gmail, click the “photos” link to go to Picasa Web Albums.

click link to picasa web albums

If you need help resizing and exporting your photos for the web using iPhoto, please read over my tutorial.

If you are using Picasa, I have a tutorial for that as well. Both tutorials are older from previous years.

Upload Photos to Picasa Web Albums

Once you are in Picasa Web Albums, click the “upload” link.

Type a name for a new photo album or “add to an existing album”

If you have the Mac Finder open, you can easily drag your files into the open space on Picasa, or if you prefer doing things the old fashioned way, click the “Select photos from your computer” link and choose them that way.

Once all your photos are uploaded, click the “ok” button on the bottom right.

Change Photo Album Privacy

You’ll notice that by default your album/photos are private, only viewable by you. To change that, click the “edit” button (from column on far right) and change the visibility to “public on the web”

edit privacy for photos

Get the HTML to Embed Your Photo Into Craig’s List Ad

Once uploaded, your photos will be organized in the new album. Click on the first photo.

On the far right, you will see some photo information. Click the link to “Link to this Photo”

Select Size: Choose the appropriate size to display your photo on Craig’s List. 400 px is a good size, so choose “medium 400” from the pull down menu. (see screen shot below)

Then check the box next to “hide album link” – this will only display the photo without the main album. (see screen shot below)

Lastly, click your mouse pointer in the little code/text box for “embed image” and the complete line of code will be highlighted. (see screen shot below)

get the html code to embed photo

Once the code is highlighted, click Edit>copy from your browser menu.

Launch your Craig’s List ad text in a new tab or window in your browser and when you are ready to insert the photo into the ad text, choose Edit>Paste and the code will be pasted into your ad.

The html code should look something like this:

<a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/###feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-###/filename.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a>

Now preview your Craig’s List ad to make sure the photo is displaying properly. If so, then repeat these steps for your additional photos; paste the codes after each other in your ad.

IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTE: I’m super paranoid about Craig’s List, and you should be too (there’s a lot of scammers and nefarious browsers out there) so be aware that these ad photos are linked back to your Picasa Web Album (and gmail email address) – My advice is to set up a completely new gmail account that remains separate from your home/personal email account. That way you are not inviting strangers to view personal/family photos that you might have previously uploaded.

Keep your Craig’s List photos completely separate from your personal photos! Even if you set your other photos as “private”, you could be inviting a hacker!

Good luck and I hope this tutorial helped!

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