"How'd you do that?" - Adding BIG photos to your blog posts

A couple of quick announcements first. . . 

The Purse Week Top 10 are up! My clutch is one of the ten. Very exciting stuff! Head over to A Lemon Squeezy Home and vote your favorite.

Also, make sure to head over and check out Share the Love week at the anderson crew blog. The first few bundles are up: craft/hobby , all girl, and home / decor. Tons of cool stuff up for grabs!! The giveaway is open til Sunday, October 17th at midnight (eastern time).

A little sneak peek of some of the bundles (all this stuff could be yours!):

Ok, on to my first "blog tips" post. First, I want to say that I am no expert. Nope, not me. I just figure these things out as I go along. And sometimes I get it wrong! If you know of a better, easier, quicker way, feel free to share in the comments!

When I first started my blog, I just uploaded photos through Blogger. Unfortunately, this meant I could only choose between small, medium, and large for my image sizes. And, the large option wasn't very large. As I started finding new blogs to follow, I noticed my favorite ones had nice, large photos. Much larger than what I was able to post on my blog. That kind of bugged me so I set out to figure out how to get bigger photos on my blog. Of course, I can't remember for the life of me where I finally found what I was looking for. Basically, to get larger photos in my posts, I followed these steps:

1. when editing my photos, I would resize them fit my blog, usually 550px wide. 

*how large you can go will depend on the layout/template you are using

2. I would then upload my photos to Flickr or Photobucket.

3. One by one, I would copy the image links and paste them into the Blogger Image Uploader. I did this instead of uploading photos directly from my computer. Since the photos were hosted elsewhere, I could control what size I wanted them. 

4. Once that was done, I would have to cut and paste the image html code (in the Edit HTML tab) to the proper places within the post. For some reason, Blogger would place all the photos at the very top of the post. Grrr.

Needless to say, it was a major pain in the rear. Took too much time and eventually I ran into the problem of exceeding bandwidth on Photobucket so I had to start paying a monthly fee. Yay. Finally, thanks to the Coffeeshop Blog, I found a much better way to get larger photos on my blog! I'm pretty sure I was the last to know, so feel free to point fingers and laugh. . . I can't see you ;)

I had no idea that there was a new Blogger post editor until I read this post. NO CLUE. If you aren't using the new post editor, from your dashboard, go to Settings, then Basic and scroll down til you see Global Settings. Next to Select Post Editor, choose the Updated Editor. Once you've done that, uploading photos will be so much easier. Your photos will show up small at first, just click on the photo and then you can choose for them to show up as their original, uploaded size. Also, the photos will appear wherever you place the cursor! And you can drag and drop them if you want to rearrange things. Now, adding 20 photos to a tutorial post won't take me 5 hours :) 

Hope this makes life easier for someone! I'll try to post some more tips soon.